Ladies riding high after success

Sonja Karp
NLJ Sports Reporter
 
Volleyball may be a short season, but the Lady Dogies have managed to play the Lady Bulldogs of Wheatland five times already this year, and it appears that they may just have their number.
Heading south last Friday, Newcastle held the 3-1 advantage going in, and made quick work of the Platte County netters dropping them in three straight sets.
“Friday was great!” exclaimed head coach Ashley Reed. “The girls played as a unit and worked their tails off. They didn’t let anything get in their way, and played their own game the whole time. They just really turned around their whole perspective.”
With both teams knowing each so well, Reed gave her team different goals to work toward in each set regarding limiting Wheatland’s offensive runs and setting a maximum of points allowed per set.
The evidence that the strategy was successful can be seen in the scores. The Lady Dogies played progressively better as the match wore on, defeating the Bulldogs 25-21, 25-19 and 25-17 for the win.
On Saturday afternoon, the team picked up where they left off the night before in their rematch against
the Torrington Lady Trailblazers. When these two teams met earlier in the season in Goshen County the Blazers had their way with Newcastle, defeating them soundly in three.
It was a different Newcastle team that defended their home court to start the contest, however.
The Lady Dogies were confident and aggressive on the net, dominating their opponent throughout the first two sets and headed into the third with a 2-0 lead. The Lady Blazers were able to regroup to take the next two, though Newcastle gave them all they could handle in order to tie up the match and force it to the fifth and deciding set.
“We definitely were a
different team than when we saw them a couple of weeks ago when we got our butts handed to us,” Reed chuckled. “We came out strong and won the first two, and then were very competitive in the next two losses.”
Saturday was the first time this season that Newcastle has gone to a fifth set and fatigue began to show, which gave the Lady Blazers an advantage to win the match with a 15-6 ending score.
“Going to five sets will really take it out of you, especially when a few players never come off the floor,” Reed stated. “The first four were very competitive and the girls worked hard in each one, so we just kind of ran out of gas at the end.”
Though the Lady Dogies would have liked to end the night with another W, Reed was pleased with the progress her team has shown in several aspects of the game, and a big positive from the weekend was a much improved serving percentage by the squad.
The ladies had an 88 percent success rate on Friday and 90 percent on Saturday. The team has been averaging in the mid-70th percentile from the service line so far this season, which made it extraordinarily difficult to pull out wins.
“We really stepped it up a lot this weekend,” Reed nodded. “We knew it was a problem so we have been really focusing on that aspect of the game in practice and I think the girls are realizing exactly where they are at, and what they need to be doing in order to improve.”
This week the Lady Dogies have only one contest which will be senior night against Thermopolis on Friday. The Lady Bobcats beat Newcastle in three last time at their place but the Lady Dogies beat them in two at the Douglas invite, so this third matchup will give one team the leg up in the series.
Given this is a quadrant contest, Reed and her crew are hoping to carry over the confidence gained from the weekend, and they will be presenting a different lineup than last time which has been working better for Newcastle.