Wawasee Overcomes Twists In Win At ConcordELKHART — Discouraging twists abounded for Wawasee in set four Thursday, enough to suggest the visitors might struggle to regroup by set five.
Yet, the Warriors not only regrouped, but were authoritative from the get-go in that decisive set, finishing off a chilling 25-21, 25-22, 17-25, 26-28, 15-10 Northern Lakes Conference volleyball road victory over Concord to spoil the Minutemen’s Senior Night.
“Between that substitution error of mine and those (errant) serves we had when we had a chance to win, those are things that kind of make you go, ‘Oh-oh,’” Wawasee coach Jeff Phillips said. “Those are hard to recover from. Those can make you real tight.”
Instead, Wawasee snatched the first four points of the final set with splashy plays, getting a kill from senior Liz Kloepfer, a block from senior Molly Jones and then back-to-back kills from Emma Dippon — a junior who typically plays up the middle, but was on the outside this night. The Warriors (6-8, 1-2), scratching back from a 16-11 hole, had appeared to close to 17-15 on an ace by Ella Williamson in the fourth set, but the aforementioned substitution violation instead made the deficit 18-14.
Concord (5-10, 0-4) jumped on the sudden shift in momentum to push its lead to 20-14, yet Wawasee clawed back a second time in the set, even owning match points at 24-23 and 26-25. Both of those, though, were followed by the untimely service errors.
“I made a substitution early in the match that was not a usual one, so I messed up in not remembering I’d done that,” Phillips said of what led to the penalty point, “so I was really proud of the girls for coming back from that and going ahead a couple times, but then we had those serves.”
Those serves were addressed going into the fifth set.
“We talked about how our defense is good enough, so just serve the ball in play, set up our block, play good defense and let’s see what happens,” Phillips said. “I felt like we were going to win more than half the points if we could just serve. The girls played really well at the start (of the last set), and got a nice lead.”
The 4-0 start was soon stretched to 10-3 on an ace by Kloepfer, with the Minutemen getting no closer than four points the rest of the way.
Dippon and sophomore Leslie Vasquez, who shifted from outside to middle, were both effective in their newer spots. Dippon led the Warriors with 10 kills. Vasquez had 2.5 blocks to go with four kills.
Senior libero Madi Simmons recorded six aces for the winners, while Jones put down three blocks.
Concord was paced by its sophomore trio of Ella Norwood (eight kills, two blocks), Sophia Trout (six kills, three aces) and Olivia Bieganski (five kills, three aces, two blocks).
Wawasee hosts an eight-team invitational Saturday beginning at 9 a.m., while the Minutemen head to the Michigan City Invitational the same day.
