OTTAWA – The Sycamore volleyball team was looking to stay right in the hunt for an Interstate 8 Conference championship, while the Ottawa team was hoping to keep alive its outside shot of being in the mix when the teams met Thursday night.
The Spartans used strong net play by seniors Laci Neece and Grace Lichtardt to keep their hopes alive for the title with a 25-20, 19-25, 25-20 victory over the Pirates on Volley For Veterans night in front of a loud crowd at Kingman Gymnasium.
Neece recorded 13 kills with a pair of aces, while Lichtardt had 12 kills and four aces to help the visitors improve to 17-11 overall and 7-2 in conference play.
“This place is a great place to play volleyball with the crowd feeling like it’s right on top of you,” Sycamore coach Jennifer Charles said. “You feel the energy from the fans for sure.
“Our setters did an excellent job of feeding the hot hitters and running an efficient offense. They did a great job of mixing things up. We had a tough match against La Salle-Peru the other night where we had to grind things out, and that’s really what we did again here tonight. We are starting to learn as a team that even if we are down, or things aren’t going as smoothly as we would like, we can still push together and get the job done.”
Ava Carpenter added six kills and Jaycie Funderburg five for Sycamore.
The Spartans opened the night scoring the first nine points, and although Ottawa regrouped to cut the deficit to two on three occasions, kills by Funderburg and Lichtardt closed out the set.
The Pirates held leads of 11-7 and 21-16 in the second set before Sycamore got to within 21-19. But from there, a sideout kill by Chey Joachim and a three-point serving spurt by Skylar Dorsey finished it off.
The third set was tied at 14-all before three kills by Lichtardt and a block by Avery Gerdes put the Spartans in control for good.
Ottawa was paced by 10 kills and five aces from Ryleigh Stevenson, nine kills from Joachim, and four winning swings each from Alyssa Malmassari and Dorsey.
“Not that we wanted to go down 9-0 to start the night, but I was very proud of the resiliency we showed bouncing back,” said Ottawa coach Jenn Crum. “We were able to get within a couple points in the opening set, then came out and played solidly to win the second. We just weren’t able to really grab the momentum in the third set and Sycamore made a little push in the middle of it to take control.
“It really comes down to four points tonight and unfortunately, we weren’t able to get them while they were. I feel like we played really well after the slow start. We’ve had a number of matches this season where we’ve come back to win after being down, but tonight it just didn’t work out for us.”
Ottawa (21-7, 4-4) is back in action Saturday at the Mendota Invite, while Sycamore hosts DeKalb on Monday.