KILLING IT — Weir High’s Maleea Faulks attempts to hit a kill past Big Red’s Emma Lyons and Arya Bigsby during Thursday’s match on Ron “Fritz” Williams Court. – Andrew Grimm
WEIRTON — Weir High and Big Red battled for five sets in perhaps one of the most entertaining volleyball matches of the season Thursday night.
In the end, it was the Red Riders who made the last play to come out on top. The victory gives Weir a season sweep of Steubenville.
Neither team won back-to-back sets, and four of the five were back-and-forth and closely contested from start to finish.
“It was a great match, I was worried at times” Weir High head coach Fran Capaldi said. “The difference this year is we’ve put ourselves in a lot of these situations and we’re coming out on top in the fifth set.
“We work hard on stressful situations in practice and we’ve been in a lot of these situations this season, so I guess you could say we’re getting comfortable in the uncomfortable situations.”
The Red Riders (8-9-1) created a little distance late and won the first set, 25-21, then Big Red (7-11) countered and did the same in the second to even the match with a 25-20 set win.
The hosts fended off Big Red in the third, 25-22, for a 2-1 advantage, but Big Red was not ready to quit, as it scored the first nine points of the fourth set and led by as many points as 12 on the way to a 25-15 win to stay alive.
In the fifth, both teams had an advantage of one or two points multiple times, but neither was able to pull away. After Big Red took a 13-12 lead, Weir High scored the final three points to win the deciding set and the match by a 15-13 count.
“It was a huge bounce-back in that fifth set,” Capaldi said. “I don’t even know what happened to us in the fourth. We just kind of let our guard down. Big Red is a team that, when they get rolling, they keep the momentum. We were down in the fifth, too. To bounce back like that says a lot about the girls.”
For the Red Riders, Mea Kaufman had 16 assists, 25 digs, an ace and a kill, Janai Turner has two assists, 20 digs and an ace, Maleea Faulks tallied an ace, eight kills and three digs, Brayley Lash had six digs, seven blocks, an ace and 16 kills and Amalea Kirlangitis had 14 assists, three digs and an ace.
“It was a great match, Weir is a good team, we just have to be able to finish,” Big Red head coach Logan Colabella said. “I told the girls I’m not upset with their effort, they played hard, we just have to find ways to finish the game.
“It’s been one of our struggles this season, that’s something we have to work on going into the postseason.”
For Big Red, Sena Smith has four digs and four assists, Sarah Allen had 22 kills, two aces, three digs and an assist, Julia Arlesic tallied two aces, four digs and an assist, Jules Cramer had two kills, two aces and two digs, Analesa Perdue had 10 kills, six blocks and two aces and Emma Lyons had 10 kills.
“We did a good job of dealing with adversity,” Colabella said. “One of our seniors went down. I’m proud that they kept battling after that, they could have let that take them out of it completely and they didn’t.”
UP NEXT
Big Red: Takes on Cambridge on Saturday.
Weir High: Plays in the sectional seeding tournament Saturday in Fairmont.
