Serve turns tide for Waubonsie

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During the closing moments of a tense first set between Waubonsie Valley and St. Charles East on Tuesday, Saints coach Kate McCullagh was back and forth between her chair and the side of the court, trying desperately to coax a win out of her squad.

Warriors coach Al Lagger sat stoically in his seat, moving only to call a timeout to gather his team.

"The guys started to play not to lose instead of playing to win," Lagger said. "I told them at the time, 'Go out and play to win and when you execute, good things will happen.' And that's what we did -- we executed and we got the point we needed.'"

Waubonsie pulled out the 30-28 win before dominating the second set 25-17 to run their record to 9-7 overall and 4-0 in the Upstate Eight Conference.

The Warriors fell behind 4-1 to start the second set before senior Traeger Penicook served a couple of aces to lead his team on a 7-0 run and squash any hopes St. Charles East had of forcing a third set.

"That's kind of what we've been struggling with lately," McCullagh said of the momentum shift. "For some reason we will do really well and then (the other team) will go on a big run against us. We have a hard time recovering from that. By that point the game is going so fast and everyone kind of looks panicked and we have to slow them down.

"We were beating ourselves at the end."

Penicook finished with nine kills and nine digs, but it was his serve that gave the Warriors the edge.

"My serving really improved today," he said. "When we keep up our hustle and our intensity, that's when we can go on runs. It's when we take a break and we're like, 'Oh, we're winning. Oh, wow' that we stop and kind of go away from the game plan. When we keep going, it's fun."

Said Lagger: "We practice really hard every day on serving. We go five minutes of each serve -- short serve, long serve, jump serve. We practice really hard on getting our serves in and hitting our zones.

"Traeger was watching and hitting the zone and the kid he was hitting to was a kid I was picking on. We were going at that kid for a reason because I saw in warm-ups that he was struggling passing. That's how we got the 7-0 run; all seven serves went to that kid."

Senior Connor Dougherty had 14 kills and four blocks in the win, while junior Russell Penicook added nine kills and three blocks.

Waubonsie's Erik Johnson had 24 assists, sophomore Sean Elvert had 19 assists and senior libero Scott Johnson had 12 digs.

St. Charles East (10-11, 2-2) was led by senior Jeff Jones' 30 assists to go with junior Baxter Reed's 14 digs.