Girls volleyball: Naperville North's experience comes in handy at Palatine

Like a true team player, Naperville North's Sarah Kushner has no idea what her career high is for kills in a match.

Or any idea how many kills she connected for in Tuesday's nonconference match at Palatine.

But she did have an idea of why it seemed like she was putting down a kill every time you looked up in the Huskies' 25-9, 25-15 triumph.

"The middles were doing a good job drawing the block," said the senior Illinois State recruit. "I had a lot of one-on ones. They (middles) they were making my job look easy."

Kushner made it look easy, too, with her explosive arm work and vertical, which resulted in a match-high 14 kills.

"She is a load," said Palatine coach Dan Gavin, whose team was playing its first match of the season. "We knew that coming in. I don't think we necessarily committed our defensive system to stopping her. We were kind of freelancing a bit. We relaxed a little bit which is just going to cause problems against any outside hitter, let alone a good one."

The Pirates have good one, too, in senior Haley Holz, who led her team with 10 kills, 7 digs, 1 block and 1 ace.

Not bad for someone who suffered an ankle injury on the last day of summer camp in late July.

"It's nice to see Haley back out there," Gavin said. "It's nice to see her get back close to 100 percent. She's not quite there yet but she has been gutting it out, and every day is better."

"That No. 7 (Holz) is a nice player," said Huskies coach Jennifer Urban. "She was starting to fire on all cylinders at the end of the match. I know she will be a good player for them."

Urban has some other good players, too, who helped keep the Pirates' defense from devoting all its attention to Kushner.

Sophomore middle Ellie Hall, senior right side Kayla Griesbach, sophomore outside Eva Harting and junior middle Linnea Dale each had 3 kills.

They took their cues from senior setter Grace Selman, who collected 25 assists.

"Our goal is always to try and set a balanced offense," Urban said. "Outside of Sarah, we had four hitters with 3 kills each so that means we were distributing the ball well. But Grace (Selman) was able to put up a good ball where Sarah had a lot of one-on-ones and when she has a one-on-one, she is going to put the ball away."

Kushner put away her first kill to make it 4-0 and the Huskies never looked back in Set 1, which ended on a nifty back set from Selman to Griesbach for the 25th point.

In Set 2, a kill by Kushner made it 9-3. A kill by Holz and ace from sophomore Jillian Smith (3 digs) made it 9-5 but that's as close as the hosts got.

"Jillian did some nice things," Gavin added. "We needed her to play with the confidence in herself that we have in her because when she does that, she is an unstoppable player."

Sophomore Allison Drake made her setting debut for the Pirates, handing out 14 assists. Teammate Karina Szafraniec had a block while Izzy Hagenbuch registered 4 digs and Emily Campe a pair of kills.

"I thought Allison recovered well and did a nice job at the end," Gavin said. "Her head was certainly spinning at the beginning of the match being her first varsity one.

"But you could see the game start to slow down for her which was nice.

"There were certainly some growing pains for us at the start of the match, which is little bit to be expected with a young team playing and against an experienced and a really good team in Naperville. But we love playing them every year."

The Huskies raised their record to 5-1, after taking third place with a 4-1 record at the Wheaton North tournament last week.

"Overall, this was a good team win," said Urban whose club also received 7 digs apiece from freshman Ashley Kushner and senior Molly Russell.

"We took what we learned from playing at Wheaton and came back in practice to work on some things," said Sarah Kushner. "We came in with that mindset so we definitely looked a lot cleaner on our side. We knew Palatine would be really excited because it was their first match at home. But we were focused on our side. We have really good team chemistry and it was really fun out there. That's what we want to do - have fun and play hard."