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Barnesville Falls to Breckenridge in Championship Match of Tournament

By Craig Olson, 10/02/21, 11:00PM CDT

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Barnesville hosted their home volleyball tournament on Saturday and made it all the way to the championship match.  In pool play the Trojans beat Battle Lake 2-0 (25-10, 25-16), beat Frazee 2-0 (25-11, 25-14) and beat Menahga 2-0 (25-19, 25-22) to take first place and advance to the championship match against the Breckenridge Cowgirls who had won three matches by 2-0 (25-16, 25-17) scores also, beating Win-E-Mac, Fertile-Beltrami and New York Mills in their round robin pool play.  Breckenridge then beat Barnesville 2-0 to claim first place.

Barnesville was led by Emily Bredman (22 kills, 5 blocks, 5 block assists), Anna Stanford (20 kills, 2 blocks, 22 digs, 3 aces), Lexi Bolgrean (17 kills, 2 blocks, 20 digs), Emily Smith (11 kills, 5 blocks, 8 aces), Katie Newell (68 set assists, 21 digs, 4 kills, 1 ace), Sydney Strand (17 digs and Kenzie Skogen (15 digs).

“We had a great start to our tournament taking on Battle Lake to start off the early morning,” said Barnesville Head Coach Megan Askegaard. “We moved the ball well with our passing and we were able to attack with all hitters during this first match. We ran many free ball sets and were able to use our middles when we were on. I was pleased with how well our subs played when they made it into the match. We played great defense and picked up many balls that were sent to our side. We also served them very tough and it created some easy points for us on offense.”

Askegaard went on to discuss the second match of pool play saying, “We matched up with the Hornets again from Frazee. We really focused on putting up a tough first serve ball and eliminating our mistakes on our 1st and 3rd balls. We played great defense and really worked together as a team out on the court. We kept our ball in system and made sure we had an aggressive attack up against their defense. Our block did a nice job getting to where it needed to be and closing up all gaps along the net.”

In the third set of pool play the Trojans matched up with Menahga. “This match was a lot of tough serving and making sure we moved out of serve receive quickly,” stated Coach Askegaard. “We didn’t pass as well as we could have in this set and needed to move our feet more than we did. Our defense was just one step slower than it typically is. We weren’t reading things quick enough. They caught us standing up a few times and scored some easy points against them. We also had too many attacking errors due to our passing that was just off the mark from where it usually is. We were able to pull off the win and move ourselves into the championship match against Breckenridge.”

Askegaard continued, “We knew that we wanted to battle back against them after losing to them in 5 sets on their home court. We always found ourselves just a couple points shy of their score. They have some great hitters and they do a nice job picking up a lot of balls in the backcourt. We really needed to attack  in their weak areas as much as we could, but our serve receive was just coming up a little short. We needed to also run our middles more against them and we were not able to use them as effectively as we wanted. They are a very strong team and will continue to play well the rest of the season. They came out attacking us through the entire match today. They were just too much for us.” 

New York Mills won the third place match 2-0 over Battle Lake and fifth place went to Menahga with a 2-0 win over Fertile-Beltrami.