It was a thrilling week for the girls volleyball team. They had two duels against very strong opponents, one being Lincoln Southeast who were the reigning state champions last year, and the other being Papillion La Vista who were the state runners up. The team showed up to play and took home victories in both of these big games.
Their first duel of the week was on Tuesday Sept.10 against the Papillion-LaVista Monarchs. The Warriors swept the Monarchs in three straight sets that night. It was a great game for many players including senior hitter Ashlyn Paymal who had eighteen kills during the match. Head coach Andrew Wehrli was very happy with how the girls showed off their skills.
“We’ve been talking about making the next play and I thought they did a great job tonight,” Wherli said. “I thought our kids did a great job of just putting a whole game together.”
Just two nights later on Sept.12 the team took on the Lincoln Southwest Silver Hawks. They are a very competitive team that won the state championship last year so it was a great match-up for the Warriors. The girls did not let the team’s reputation shake them at all though. They put this game away in three sets sweeping the Silver Hawks. Senior Setter Peyton Meyer knew this was a big step towards the rest of their season.
“It means everything, I mean we’ve worked really hard and I think we keep winning but that win means a lot more. We got knocked out early last year and that’s a game that was personal so I think it’s really cool that we won in a sweep and by such a big margin,” Meyer said.
Paymal was a big part of the exciting win on Thursday. She had 11 kills and served up two aces in the match. She was very proud of the team as a whole during this game and believes the win was definitely a team effort.
“We definitely all came together easily in this game. There were a lot of opportunities for us to play together and work hard and score all the points we needed to, to sweep them in this match,” Paymal said.
Paymal also recognized that wins like this don’t come automatically. She thinks the most important thing to achieve these wins is to give all 100 percent effort in every practice that they have so she can play at her best in these tight matches.
“Obviously I take every single practice seriously and I’m out there working just as hard as everyone else. I’m really getting good work in in practice with the shots and the serving and everything like that and it’s really transitioning to the game,” Paymal said.
Wehrli also acknowledged that the hard work in practice was paying off in their games this week. Especially in their second game of the week, he was proud of the team as a whole for their great hitting and blocking performances.
“The fun part about tonight is that we’ve spent all week in the gym working on blocking and I think tonight was our highest number of blocks and positive touches and when we get positive touches we convert that into good offense. So it was a good night,” Wehrli said.
Meyer was a very big asset to the team in Thursday’s game. She came out of the three sets with 36 assists and three aces. She thinks the team is making a smooth transition from the practice court to the game court.
“We’ve been working all week in practice on continuing to dominate, trying to push even when we’re up and I’m really glad we were able to execute that tonight,” Meyer said.
Coming out of these two big wins the Warriors moved to the top of the teams in Nebraska, and were ranked first in the class A teams. This is a great accomplishment for right now but the girls only have their eyes set on being number one when state rolls around.
“I mean being number one is super cool and it’s great, but at the same time we want to be number one in November. I mean it’s great now and we’re gonna take it, but we have to keep expanding on that because the goal is November, it doesn’t really matter right now in September,” Meyer said.
