SHELBY — Shelby didn’t take the easy route to Tuesday’s sweep of Oceana County foe Hesperia Tuesday, but the Tigers got the win just the same, taking a 25-7, 25-20, 25-12 victory.
After rolling through game one - and celebrating Brylee Friedman’s recent 1,000th career dig in front of the home crowd - Shelby sputtered early in games two and three, allowing Hesperia to take the early lead both times. However, the home team responded both times and were able to polish off the victory.
“Something we’ve struggled with a lot this season is keeping our focus through an entire set,” Shelby coach McKenna Peters said. “There’s been a lot of games where we get a lead of 10-11 points and then let teams come back in. That’s been the biggest thing. A lot of things happened in set one that were super exciting, and we lost our focus a little bit. We just had to reel them back in and focus on the game.”
It helped that Shelby (8-14, 2-1 West Michigan Conference Rivers) had star hitter Kylie Brown to turn to. Brown was set the ball a lot Tuesday, especially in game three, and delivered some blistering hits. She went for a .621 hitting percentage, recording 15 kills on just 21 attempts.
Peters said Brown can jump well and has a high swing, preventing her from getting blocked that often. She’s the clear focal point of the offense.
“When we’re able to get her in a good spot, she’s really strong for us,” Peters said of Brown. “That’s a big part of our goal, is getting our passes to our setter (Peyton Rapes) enough so we can run her more often. We’ve noticed in games when our passing isn’t as on and we can’t run her, we struggle a little bit.”
Rapes had a good match for the Tigers, collecting 33 assists. Friedman added 12 kills.
Briar Peters, younger sister of the coach, had a key serving run late in game two, helping the Tigers erase a 15-8 deficit and jump ahead 17-16 before ultimately taking the game.
Peters perhaps isn’t armed with quite the explosive attacking talent of her older sister - at least not yet - but she’s displayed her volleyball acumen much of the season, consistently finding herself among the team’s stat leaders in a given match. She was again Tuesday, with a team-best seven aces and 11 digs, second on the team to Ariana Garza’s 22.
“She has a really strong volleyball knowledge,” coach Peters said. “She’s undersized, and sometimes it’s a bit of a struggle when we play bigger teams. We’ve been working a lot on using your blockers as your power and hitting high, and so she’s learned to just stay aggressive and swing high.”
Hesperia coach Erin Redinger-Rottier said she felt her team was too tentative, hoping the Tigers would beat themselves. A few errors were big parts of Hesperia’s grabbing early leads in games two and three, but outside of a good stretch of game two, the Panthers (4-7, 1-3 WMC Rivers) didn’t play with the confidence their coach hoped to see.
“It’s not something that will change overnight, but I’m trying to instill it in them every day,” Redinger-Rottier said. “We’re stepping up and doing it, and we just need everybody, and we need every play. We don’t have a lot of room for error.
“That mental game affects everything. It affects our serving. It affects our serve receive. It affects our hitting. It affects our defense. If we can master that, I think the skills will show up in a way that we haven’t seen yet. Right now we’re chasing our tails, reacting after the ball’s in play instead of trying to figure out how to get to the ball before.”
Redinger-Rottier added that she “wouldn’t count us out” and the team is working on game situations in practice in hopes of building the confidence necessary to step up against talented opponents.
“I do feel like it’s a good group of girls that really do want to put in the work, but we’re fighting an uphill battle,” Redinger-Rottier said. “We’re still hungry for it.”
