“Great way to start off the first day of school with a home opener,” stated Barnesville Head Coach Megan Askegaard. “Great to see all the fans in the gym as well as it was a very full house. We had a couple goals for tonight with the first being to make sure that we served them tough and made them get out of system for the first ball. The girls did a great job with that as we were serving up many aces in the first set especially. We also needed to pass the ball well so we could run our offense the way that we wanted to. We took great control of the ball throughout the first set of play running our offense and making great defensive plays against the Falcons. Katie Newell (24 set assists, 21/23 serving, 8 aces, 6 digs) did an excellent job running the ball to our key hitters up in the front. Katie did a fantastic job serving the start of the second set by stringing together 5 points to get things started. We had more errors in the second set due to communicating well with our teammates and making sure we were passing the ball on the net in order to run our offensive options. Set 3 started with Katie firing off 4 serves to start us out again. This was the spark that we needed to get our momentum back on track.  Our defense made some great plays and our block was more apparent in this set. Lexi Bolgrean (10 kills, 8 digs) and Anna Stanford (8/10 serving, 2 aces, 10 digs, 2 kills) did a great job out on the outside attacking the net and making some excellent defensive digs. Park took advantage of our mistakes and really worked us on serve receive tonight. We definitely need to pass better all-around to keep our offense running smoothly.”

Other statistical leaders were Emily Smith (8 kills, 11/12 serving), Emily Bredman (5 kills, 1 solo block, 1 block assist), Sydney Strand (10/11 serving, 10 digs) and Kenzie Skogen (9/9 serving, 5 digs).