By TIM TAYLORValley Sports Report
WAVERLY — Waverly battled past Sayre, 3-2, in a 5-set volleyball thriller here Monday evening. It was a match which had fans of both teams on the edge of their seats for the majority of the night.
“I love to be a part of matches like that,” said Sayre coach Colby Sangrey. “It's unfortunate we weren't on the winning side of it, but I'm really, really happy with the stuff that we showed on the court against a good team.
“At this point in the season when we're looking towards districts and onward, that's the kind of volleyball that we want to be playing, so even with the loss, it gives us a lot to look forward to.”
Waverly coach Hailee Rote was aware her squad might get a challenge from the Redskins.
“I think we knew that coming in,” she said. “We played Sayre a couple times in summer league, and they're always scrappy and they’ve got a lot of good players on their team, so we knew it was going to be a battle going into it.
Sayre would take the first set, 25-19, but Waverly tied the match with a 26-24 win in the second set. The third set went to the Wolverines, 25-19, but the visitors forced a fifth set with 25-21 victory in the fourth set. Waverly turned away a Sayre rally in the decisive set, winning by a 16-14 margin.
Neither team could build decisive advantages, although the Redskins led by as many as six points in the first set and Waverly had a 7-point bulge in the second set.
In the opener, the Redskins built a 15-9 lead, but Waverly trimmed it to 19-18. A trio of aces by Reghan McGaughey and a block by Azalea McClenny pushed made it a 24-19 contest. The Wolverines got the ball back following a net serve, but served the ball out of bounds to end the set.
In the second set, Waverly was clinging to a 7-6 lead, then built a 15-8 cushion as Layla Oechslin served up four points and received strong net play from her teammates.
That lead would dwindle on four Waverly miscues to make it 16-12, then three more errors allowed the Redskins to edge in front, 19-17.
The Wolverines regrouped to tie the set four times down the stretch, but trailed, 24-23, on McClenny’s hit over the front row. A side out tied the set at 24, then Ava Heath put Waverly up, 25-24, with an ace. The set ended when a Sayre miscommunication created a hitting error.
With the momentum in its favor, Waverly went ahead early in the third set, 6-3, as Addison Foster found a hole on the right side, then added a block.
Several nice hits combined with some errors by both teams kept things close for several points with a block from Meeya Wheeler and Heath’s cross-corner kill put the home team ahead to stay, 18-17.
A trio of Redskin miscues and a pair of kills from Foster and Heath clinched the win.
The Wolverines jumped out to an 8-1 lead in the fourth set, but the eighth point was removed and a point awarded to Sayre to make it 7-2 when a Waverly player went under the net.
That helped spark a Redskin rally. An Afftyn VanDuzer ace tied the score at nine, the teams swapped errors. Sayre built 14-1 and 17-14 leads, but the Wolverines fought back to tie things up at 18 and 19.
A pair of Waverly miscues wrapped around a McGaughey kill helped the Redskins hang on for the win and force the decisive final set.
Kills by Lauryn Welles, Emma Randall, Heath and Leraya Teeter, along with Sayre hitting error, gave Waverly a 5-0 advantage, but three Wolverine hits into the net and a block by Ember Jones allowed the Redskins to knot the score at 5-5.
Waverly would squeak in front, 8-7, then follow up with three more points for an 11-7 lead. Welles placed a kill shot just inside the backline and Heath blasted a hard shot into the middle of the Sayre defense, making it a 13-8 difference.
Sayre refused to let up and rallied back to tie the set at 14, but Heath put a side out shot into the middle and Welles followed with a hit to the middle which Sayre was unable to dig successfully, ending the match.
Legendary football coach Lou Holtz may have noted it best when he said, “It’s too bad somebody has to lose.”
“It's nice to know that these girls just don't ever give up no matter what the score is,” Sangrey said. “We could be down seven points like we were in that fourth set or five points in the short fifth set, and they don't really care about it. They're not going to give up. It's something that we want to work on, not getting ourselves in that hole in the first place, but that fight is something that you can't really teach. We're really fortunate to have girls that are willing to give us that.”
“We've been working on being able to handle pressure during games, so I think that we were able to work on that today, and then we were able to perform under pressure,” Rote said.
“That's the pressure that we haven't been handling well, so today that was our goal, was to handle that kind of pressure well,” she added. “Teams are always going to score points, and we have to be able to score them right back, so we were able to do that, and it was what we intended to get out of this match.”
Adding to the excitement of the night was the record-setting performance of Wheeler. The freshman broke the school record for assists in a match, dishing out 46 and breaking the previous mark of 41 set by Brooke Bennett in 2015 against Spencer-Van Etten.
Reghan McGaughey posted a double-double for Sayre with 27 digs, 17 kills, two assists and three aces. Yhale Doon had seven digs, two kills, and four aces; Emily Strickland chipped in with one dig, five kills, and one block; Mylee Medina registered 10 digs; Azalea McClenny contributed 12 digs, eight kills, and blocks; Ember Jones added four blocks; Grace Russo had 23 digs; Alex Schack pitched in with 16 digs, six kills, and one ace; and VanDuzer tacked on five kills and an ace.
For Waverly, Wheeler added a kill, an ace and five digs to her assist record while Heath registered a double-double with 13 kills, 14 digs and four aces. Layla Oechslin contributed 18 digs; Welles had 14 kills, a block and a dig; Foster pitched in with nine kills and two blocks; Teeter had three kills, two aces and 18 digs; Emma Randall chipped in with four kills, two kills and one block; Emma Williams had four kills, a block and a dig; Elizabeth Cole added two aces and three digs; Natasha Lane tacked on three kills, two assists, an ace and 10 digs; Kendall Rockwell contributed six kills and a block; and Mady Briggs added four digs and an ace.
——————
IN PHOTO 1: Waverly’s Meeya Wheeler broke the school record for assists in a match. IN TOP PHOTO: There was plenty of action at the net between Sayre and Waverly. … PHOTOS BY TIM TAYLOR.
