Wolf senior Kyla Briscoe pounded a season-high 12 kills Tuesday against Sequim. (Photo by JohnsPhotos.net)
As losses go, this one doesn’t sting too badly.
The Coupeville High School volleyball squad went toe-to-toe, and kill-to-kill, with an aggressive, big-hitting squad from 2A Sequim Tuesday, and essentially played them to a standstill.
While the 1A Wolves came up on the short end of the count in a 25-22, 17-25, 26-24, 25-21 non-conference tilt, if you take out the sets format, the final score was a razor-thin 93-92.
Coupeville drops to 7-2 on the season, but gets a huge jolt of confidence heading into the stretch run.
Sitting at 4-0 in Olympic League play, the Wolves, who are gunning for a second-straight conference crown, kick off their final five regular-season matches Oct. 17 with a trip to Klahowya.
The lessons learned under fire Tuesday will be a huge bonus going forward.
“We played pretty darn well,” said CHS coach Cory Whitmore. “When you play as cleanly as we did, you can leave the court proud.”
The Wolves are working on finding a solid mix between knowing when “to be risky and when to be smart,” and their coach liked what he saw against a Sequim team which made very few errors and constantly pushed the attack.
“We worked together to find the openings and take advantage when they were there,” Whitmore said. “We rode the peaks and valleys and showed a lot of maturity, which you hope for with a team which has so many seniors.”
One of those veterans, Kyla Briscoe, was a particular standout, flying in from the outside to pound away for a season-high 12 kills and a super-high hitting percentage, especially with how many chances she had during a long, conflict-heavy match.
“I’m really, really proud of how Kyla played,” Whitmore said. “That was exciting to see.”
The spiker guru was thrilled with how his big hitters continued to attack, while also weathering the assault waged by Sequim’s sturdy snipers.
Emma Smith, Katrina McGranahan and Payton Aparicio collected five kills apiece, while Mikayla Elfrank chipped in with four, each one of which tore up a chunk of the floor.
Coupeville showed little fear, attacking from the first point until the last in a match filled with long, intense rallies.
While there were service aces, far more often points raged on, with both sides digging deep for unexpected saves on balls which looked like sure winners.
With so many big plays, it might be hard to pick just two as the defining moments, but, call me foolhardy, cause that’s just what I’m about to do.
For Sequim, it was a double-whammy, winning a point as Coupeville prematurely celebrated.
Thinking a point was over (the ref had already started to signal it so), the Wolves converged for a group yell, only to be thrown for a loop as the ball suddenly plopped over the net behind their backs.
Against all odds, and defying the laws of nature, a visiting spiker had somehow scraped the ball off the floor at the last second, flicking it skywards, where it awkwardly rattled off various body parts of two teammates and crawled, by the smallest of margins, up and over the tape.
Six sets of cheeks turned red, but the Wolves rebounded, and, in between a hail of knee-shredding kills, setter Ashley Menges had the sneakiest winner of the year.
Deep in the fourth set, she went to launch a set, and did it so convincingly every player on the court, including the CHS hitter expecting to blast the ball, bought the fake.
Instead, at the very last millisecond, betrayed only by a slight sideways shift of her eyes, Menges, hanging in mid-air, flicked her fingers downward and not upward, shooting a tip over the net.
The next sound you heard was the collective brains of 11 other players melting, as the ball softly landed in a small opening and skipped away for a winner.
And then Menges strolled away like a stone-cold killer, epic grin in place as everyone, including her own teammates, tried to collect their jaws off the ground.
If she had whipped out a mustache and twirled it while unleashing a super-villain-taking-over-the-world laugh, no one could have faulted her.
Whitmore and assistant coaches Chris Smith and Ashley Herndon, for their part, came unglued, as all three came dangerously close to storming the court and carrying Menges off on their shoulders.
Coupeville put together a fairly substantial highlight reel on the evening, with Elfrank and McGranahan peppering the back-line with their sizzlin’ put-aways and Hope Lodell and Aparicio digging kill shot after kill shot off the floor.
Emma Smith, the elegant assassin whose on-court work invokes memories of her aunt, former all-world Wolf spiker Joli Smith, was everywhere and nowhere at once.
She painted with all the colors, using her long reach to snuff a spike, dropping a floater between rival players, then bashing a ball that tore chunks of paint off the end-line.
Rising star Scout Smith might give up several inches to Emma Smith, but she’s quickly rising to meet the big-play challenge set by her older teammate.
The Slammin’ Smiths combined for three of Coupeville’s seven blocks on the night, while Scout went airborne for a winner on a running tip that was so pretty mom Charlotte will gnash her teeth when she finds out she missed seeing it live.
With her teammates attacking from all sides, set up by a ton of assists from Lauren Rose (18) and Menges (13), Briscoe was set free to be the final word and she delivered.
Lashing frozen ropes, she launched three straight winners at one point late in the match, setting off the Wolf student section, which serenaded her with a continuous howl.
For their part, the rival Sequim players just shook their heads, took several steps back and prayed Briscoe wouldn’t hurt them too badly.
There were no guarantees.
