It’s been a little while since Albemarle wasn’t the top seed going into the Commonwealth District tournament, but of course, when you graduate five of your top six payers, and seven players total from the previous season, that the Patriots still finished third in the regular season standings shows the depth this program has under coach Rich Lindsay. With many playing their first post season matches, Lindsay was not disappointed in his teams showing in the least bit.
“This is the first time for a lot of these girls in the post season,” Lindsay said. “For the most part they just had to focus on their part of the net and not worry about what else was going on. Sometimes you get farsighted looking around at what the scores are in the other matches.”
At the top of the ladder, Alison Henry was the first to finish as she disposed of Massaponax’s Maria Sylva 10-1. It didn’t take long for four more of her teammates to wrap up their matches to propel Albemarle to a 5-0 win in the CD quarterfinals.
“I was facing a good competitor so I was trying to stay with the points and get everything back,” Henry said. “It turned out well. We realize the matches matter a little more now, but we’re still just trying to do what we can to tough any of them out. We lost seven seniors but I think we’ve done really well to have players step up and fill the missing positions.”
The bottom half of the latter came out strong for the Patriots in the win. In the 5-spot, Kaitlyn Grossman worked quickly to earn a 10-2 win over Emily Stewart. In the 6-spot, Julie Shaw cruised through for a 10-3 win. Molly Napolitano fought off Lainey Farmer 10-4 to make it 4-0 for the Patriots. Albemarle needed just one more singles player to come through with a victory to seal the sweep and second on the latter, Callie Murray, playing Katia Brennan provided that with a 10-6 win to bring the match to an end. Her teammate, Caroline Chisholm led Emilee Hill but that match was brought to a halt once Murray made it an insurmountable 5-0 lead.
“I think here, we focused more on the individual matches which is what you have to do,” Lindsay said. “We’ve got two other teams that finished on top of us in the district, so if we can keep doing this, we’ll be alright.”
Albemarle, the third seed in the tournament, travels to face second seed Colonial Forge on Monday at 5 p.m.
