Warriors spike Eagles in three
Wed, 10/12/2005
sports CORRESPONDENT
The visiting Seattle Christian Warriors handled the previously unbeaten Evergreen Lutheran Eagles with three straight game wins, 25-19, 25-23, and 25-18, to take the match Thursday.
The Warriors went to 6-3 overall while the Eagles dropped their first match of the season, a non-league one albeit, and are now 7-1 overall.
It was an easy victory for the Warriors because they were going against a team that had a lot of things go wrong. For one thing to explain why the Eagles couldn't get a game off their friendly non-league rivals a few miles north near Sea Tac Airport.
"Those are our placements for the third hit, the 1's are the best placements, the 2's are next and then the 3's," said Angela Scharf, the Eagles head coach, as she pointed with a pen at a graph paper with numbers on it for individual points in a given game. "We didn't have very many 1's tonight."
The 1's would have been getting the ball to the likes of 6-1 all-league candidate Erika Laete, who helped the Eagles last year as a sophomore get to state for the first time in the sport for the history of the school.
Laete recorded one kill the whole night for herself, a wicked windmill smash that got the Eagles to within 24-23 in game two. Getting that kill from Laete and some momentum was nice for the little school in Des Moines that has good sports programs in basketball as well as volleyball.
But a perfectly 'nice' ending doesn't always happen after one thing nice. Just listen to the Beach Boys song with that 'wouldn't it be nice" line. The end was near in game two for the Eagles as this happened on the very next point.
The very next point SCS' Gillian Linman came up with a big block jumping high to rebuke a Laete kill attempt and that gave the Eagles the two-point win in game two.
"They were good at picking stuff up and blocking," said Scharf.
Rebecca Egger, SCS head coach, summed up the player of the game well.
"Gillian had 10 kills and six blocks," she said. "That is what we will tell the paper pretty much and Candy Oftenbro had seven digs and two kills and Erika Friedricksen had eight assists."
Those were the happy individual totals for the Warriors. Egger is happy for the Warriors' as her team has really taken off of late.
"We started off slow but we have really heated up this past couple weeks," said Egger. "We had two nonleague games that went five games that we could have taken but didn't."
The third game for the Warriors against Evergreen Lutheran was never really close. The Warriors led, 4-0, and 11-6, and 19-8 in that one, with Linman having a big kill to make it 12-8 when the Eagles were pressing to get back in that game two.
Scharf knows what her team can do better after this first loss of the season humbled the good beginning of her squad.
"SCS put us to the test," said Scharf. "We could improve on our communications and we will be working on communications."
The Eagles were without a key player, Rachael Hansen, a junior, according to Scharf.
"She plays all over for us."
Assistant Allen Ash said, "We were down a little on an injury. One of our key players went down and the other girls picked it up after that (in a Tuesday game.) So, a lot were asked to step it up again tonight. But it didn't happen again."
Egger liked the result for her team but was she really happy with it?
"We weren't playing to our full ability, but we won so that's good," she said. "This is our third game this week so we are a little tired. But they (the Eagles) were a good team."
Scharf was happy with her players like Rachelle Rude, with 13-13 on services and Stephanie Humann going 8-for-8 in that category. Also, Ann Gentele had eight assists for the Eagles.