Facing Steward for the second time this season, St. Anne’s-Belfield’s volleyball team had a pretty solid idea of what they were heading into going with its LIS tournament quarterfinal opponent. Just like the first time around, the results weren’t much different as the Saints came out strong, avoided falling into a hole after the Spartans narrowly held on to a hard fought second set. Resiliant in the third and fourth sets, STAB was able to roll past Steward 31, 25-11, 22-25, 25-17, 25-18 to advance to the LIS semifinals.
“Steward is a great team that will keep coming at you,” said St. Anne’s coach Stacey Gearhart. “They will exploit your weaknesses and fortunately tonight, we were able to go after their game. We’ve played them twice before. We knew their holes and in game one we came after them and served well.”
The Saints best set was out of the gate as they stood tied up at 5-5 and went on a 5-0 run which continued to the tune of a 20-6 stretch to take the ever important 1-0 lead.
The second set saw the Spartans overcome a 4-0 deficit to take a 17-9 lead. The Saints rallied to make it 18-17, but that was as close at they could get. Steward went up 22-18 and then STAB took three straight to get within a point again. However, Steward held firm and won 25-22 to even up the score at 1-1.
“Game two was rough because we just couldn’t pass off of the serve,” Gearhart said. “When you can’t serve-receive well and that limits your offense and that was our biggest focus between games two and three, to improve that. The other thing we went away from was hitting the ball to the corners. It didn’t have to be hard, didn’t have to be pretty, but that’s what their defense affords us.”
In the third set, STAB trailed 7-4 early before knotting things up at 9-9 by doing just that, getting the ball into the corners. From there, the Saints managed to build a 20-13 lead with the momentum on their side. By winning five of the next nine points, St. Anne’s took a 2-1 lead with a 25-17 win.
“We came together, we fought hard,” said the Saint’s Sierra Smith. “We really wanted this game, really wanted it. So just decided to play hard together as a team.”
STAB started the fourth and final set by going up 4-1 and then 8-4. The Spartans closed the gap to 14-12 but then lost four straight. With the game at 20-17, the Saints made one final push and closed out the match with at 25-18 victory.
“We tried to put the ball down and let them make the mistakes,” Smith said. “It feels great (to win). We’re usually the underdogs so come out and get a big win like that feels great.”
On the evening, Carter Morris led the way with 15 kills while Ann Cathcart was close behind with 13. Smith had eight kills and four blocks. Cathcart finished with 4.5 blocks. Sarah Bauer had four aces while Smith and Kellie Booth had three. Morris had 18 digs while Smith added 13 and Cathcart and Booth threw in 10 each. Bauer had 19 assists and Booth had 16.
“When we can pass off the serve-receive, we’ve got a great front row,” Gearhart said. “It is really nice when you can go to more than one player on the front row, and tonight, the back row too.”
STAB (13-8, 9-5) will advance to play in the LIS semifinals on the road against Trinity Episcopal. The two met last week with TES winning 3-0 and all three sets being decided by three or fewer points. The first meeting also went Trinity’s way 3-1 back in the second week of October.
