“I was very impressed with how great of a start we had tonight with the girls really working hard together as a unit out on the court,” commented Barnesville Head Coach Megan Askegaard. “We kept our lead by holding strong to a couple points at a time in the first set. I thought we really served them tough to set the tone early in the match. We had a couple balls sneak through our block and prevent us from keeping a couple rallies alive. We were tied 7-7 in the first set before we had a couple errors in our defense. We managed to get the ball back and Lexi Hoeft went back to the serving line to give us a nice lead at 14-10 before the attack from WDC scored. Our lead was 16-13 before we again made some 3rd ball errors and didn’t pick up a couple balls in the backcourt from the Wolverines. After point 17 we traded points back and forth.  We were stuck in our serve receive when the set was tied at 21 and just couldn’t find a kill to end the run.” 

Askegaard continued with this assessment of the second set.  “We bounced right back in the second set behind some smart serving placement of Amelia Newell, Macie Pauna and Kenadee Gray to give us a nice 7-2 lead to start the set. We had a couple blocking and attacking errors to allow the Wolverines to crawl right back in early in the set. We had many ties at 11-11 and 12-12 that prevented us from getting any big things going on our side of the net. Our blockers did a nice job making adjustments to their hitters who play above the net. We were able to push our lead to 17-12 before the Wolverines took a timeout that lead to an attacking error up on our side of the net. It really was our mistakes that caused us the loss of a rally tonight, and not really anything they did. We tied things back up at 20 and again 21 but made a couple crucial mistakes down the stretch and came up short.” 

As for set 3, Askegaard summarized it this way, “We seemed a little defeated as we moved into the 3rd set and really had a hard time competing through the net. We let our mistakes get the best of us and didn’t play as hard as we needed to trying to fight back down two sets to a very talented team. The first two sets tonight were great volleyball to watch and coach, now we just need to string together it all at once and put together a full match. The talent is definitely there, we just need to always use it and give it our all.” 

Barnesville was led by Hoeft (17/17 serving, 3 aces, 11 kills, 8 digs), Sophie Frederick (8/8 serving, 11 set assists), Newell (14 set assists, 11/12 serving, 1 ace, 4 digs), Abby John (8 kills, 2 solo blocks), Pauna (4 kills, 9/10 serving, 2 aces, 6 digs, 1 block assist), Lydia Braton (2 kills, 2 block assists, 1 solo block, 3/3 serving) and Gray (7/7 serving, 12 digs).

No Wadena-Deer Creek stats were reported.

The Trojans face off with Menahga Tuesday on Parent’s night in Barnesville.