Girls volleyball: Ottawa starts season strong, tops rival Streator in 2 sets

OTTAWA – With the volleyball season starting Monday, Ottawa coach Jenn Crum said she and her players were champing at the bit to get started prior to Thursday’s match with rival Streator, already with two matches under its belt.

The Pirates hit the court running on all cylinders, while the Bulldogs struggled in a couple of crucial areas, and the result was the hosts opening their overall and home schedule with a 25-17, 25-16 victory in a hot and muggy Kingman Gymnasium.

“I feel like the experience from last year and playing club over the summer has given me a lot of extra confidence coming into this year. I love my middle spot and I’m so excited for this season to see what we can do as a team. I felt like we played well.”

—  Addison Duggan, Ottawa senior middle hitter

“I don’t have much bad to say with how we played tonight,” Crum said. “You never know with a first match of the season how your team is going to react. But I will say this is a group that has experience and plays well together. We came in this year wanting to switch to a different offense, and these girls picked it up within three practices.”

[ Photos: Ottawa defeats Streator in volleyball in two sets ]

Ottawa was led by senior middle hitter Addison Duggan with five kills and a block, while classmate setter Skylar Dorsey posted four kills, 10 assists, 12 service points and four aces. Fellow senior Ella Damron had a pair of kills, 12 digs and a block, with Mary Stisser (six points) and Ana Zeglis chipping in five digs each.

“I feel like the experience from last year and playing club over the summer has given me a lot of extra confidence coming into this year,” Duggan said. “I love my middle spot and I’m so excited for this season to see what we can do as a team. I felt like we played well.

“Tonight was a great challenge right off the bat, because Streator has a lot of girls who are really good hitters. Coach Crum said we really needed to focus on their outside hitters, and I feel like we did a pretty good job of doing that. We also knew Streator was going to be a scrappy team, so it was going to be important to put points away when we had the chances.”

Streator, which struggled with 11 service errors and seven hitting miscues in the match, was paced by five kills and three digs by senior Sonia Proksa and four kills, two blocks, seven assists and two digs by junior Aubrey Jacobs. Mya Zavada recorded three blocks, and Maiya Lansford had two aces.

“The first set we had way too many (7) service errors and that was the difference,” said Streator coach Julie Gabehart, her team falling to 2-1. “Five of those missed serves were into the net, where we didn’t make Ottawa make any decisions on what to do with it. We compounded that with not being very strong in our serve receive. When it was there, we were hard to stop, but we just weren’t consistent enough in that phase. You’re not going to beat a quality team like Ottawa when you don’t serve or receive serves well. It’s a bad combination.”

In the opening set, Ottawa pushed out to a 18-10 advantage after a pair of aces by Dorsey. Streator clawed back to within 20-16 after back-to-back kills by Jacobs. From there, the Pirates got a pair of kills from Duggan and one from Dorsey on set-point to close things out.

The visitors pushed out to a 6-4 lead in the second set on an ace by Lansford and a kill by Emma Rambo. Ottawa used a four-point burst from the service line by Stisser, which included an ace, and a five-point run by Dorsey to push the lead to 18-9. In the later run, Dorsey smacked consecutive aces before scoring a kill on a shoot after a cross-court winner from Bell Markey.

The teams traded points the rest of the way before a Duggan block, then a kill on match point finished the match.

“Addison is one of those players that was really good last season even though she may have not gotten all the hype and headlines, but I don’t think that will be the case this year,” Crum said. “She played an overall very, very solid match, and I feel this is just the first of many for her this year.”

Both teams will be back in action Saturday at the Ottawa Invite.