1A girls volleyball: Marquette can’t overcome slow start in loss to Lexington in sectional semifinal

OTTAWA — As Marquette girls volleyball coach Mindy McConnaughhay sat down on the bench for the post-match interview after Tuesday’s Class 1A sectional semifinal loss against Lexington at Bader Gymnasium, she shrugged her shoulders with her palms up with a ‘What are you going to do’ facial expression.

“It was like deja vu for sure,” said McConnaughhay. “All season long we’ve let our emotions get the best of us and it happened again tonight in the first set. Big crowd, big match, and we just came out too slow, way slower than you can in a sectional match and expect to succeed. And yes, something just clicked for us towards the end of the first set, but you just can’t lose an opening set the way we did. It’s just going to take a lot of energy to get back into the match.”

The Crusaders (23-12-1) quickly fell behind to the Minutemen (29-7) in the opening-set 25-13 loss, then played better, but not quite good enough in dropping the second set 25-18.

Lexington, which also defeated Marquette 25-17, 25-3 to open the season back in August, now plays Cissna Park, which defeated Yorkville Christian in straight sets in the opening semifinal, in Thursday’s 6 p.m. championship match.

“After the first set my message to the team was that it was a great first set, but winning one set doesn’t win the match,” Lexington coach Kelli Aho said. “You knew Marquette wasn’t just going to come out in the second set and make it easy, I mean they are a good team and showed their fight toward the end of the first. We just wanted to stick to what we do well, and if Marquette did get on a run or two, just tip your cap, stay calm, and continue to play to our strengths.”

Lexington jumped out to leads of 6-1 and 11-3 in the first set before sideout and an eight-point serving run by Brooke Stover exploded the advantage to 20-3. The hosts scored 10 of the set’s final 15 points and looked to have gotten on track.

“The second set started pretty well, and I thought, ‘OK, we’ve settled in,’ but their No. 8 (Avery Poppe) gets a handful of kills, and we made a couple of mistakes,” McConnaughhay said. “You could just see us starting to panic again. We played more aggressive and smarter in the second set, but Lexington was just the better team tonight. We just had way too many hitting errors (13 to the Minutemen’s four), and errors at this time of the season usually send you home.”

After a pair of kills each from Marquette’s Avery Durdan and Kaitlyn Davis the second set was tied at 6. A sideout winning swing by Poppe was followed by a five-point burst by Meredith Grunloh in which Poppe added three more kills to make it 12-6.

“I feel like we have a pretty well-rounded team, but when we need a point or to stop an opponent’s run, we have a couple of pretty solid outside hitters to go to,” Aho said. “When you get to this point, sectional semifinals, you have to stick what got you to this point and I felt like we did a great job of that tonight.”

A pair of blocks from Kelsey Cuchra helped the Cru close to within 19-15, but two kills from Eva McCue and another from Kennedy Sennett helped Lexington close out the set and match.

Marquette was led by six kills from Davis, five from Durdan and three from Cuchra, the latter also recording two blocks each, while Kealey Rick had eight service points, including the Crusaders lone ace of the night.

Poppe finished with seven kills and Sennett five kills and nine points for Lexington.

“We were a young team this year,” McConnaughhay said. “The seniors were great and did everything I asked of them. We’ll see how the younger girls come out next season with a season of experience they now have.”