Freshman volleyball ace Dakota Strong (right) filled up the stat sheet Tuesday night. (Parker Hammons photo)
Erase the final couple minutes and this was one for the archives.
La Conner’s JV volleyball squad made the plays it needed to at crunch time Tuesday, holding off four match points to escape with a road win.
That’s true.
But for the first 98.2% of the match, Coupeville’s freshman-dominated squad put together its best performance of the season.
That’s also true.
The scoreboard will tell you La Conner escaped with a 20-25, 26-24, 15-2 win, and the record book will tell you the Wolves fall to 2-5 in Northwest 2B/1B League play, 4-9 overall.
What you won’t know, unless you were there in the CHS gym, was that Cow Town’s JV spiker crew came together in impressive fashion Tuesday night.
The Wolves put points up on the board against a top-level team, and they did it as a unit.
There have been bright moments for these young guns, and moments when lessons were learned, but this was the first match where you truly felt all six players on the floor were clicking as one.
Coupeville came out breathing fire and droppin’ haymakers, rolling out to an 11-1 lead in the opening set.
Rock ’em, sock ’em cousins Haylee Armstrong and Capri Anter were dealing at the service line, and Dakota Strong, Lexis Drake, and Myra McDonald were crunching winners at the net.
La Conner is resilient, and talented, however, and the Braves broke off their own impressive run, reeling off 11 straight points to reclaim the lead.
Chloe Marzocca tracks an incoming ball. (Kaitlyn Leavell photo)
From there, the two squads exchanged body blows, careening through four ties before team leader Chloe Marzocca pushed Coupeville ahead for good.
Popping powerful serves, she kept the Braves guessing, and usually guessing wrong, with a tip winner from Anter and a nasty slicer off of Drake’s fingertips providing the final margin.
Set two went in much the same way, with the Wolves bolting in front, La Conner chipping away at the lead, then the squads hammering away at each other.
Carly Burt provided a burst of energy for CHS, while Armstrong was a flippin’ fool, drawing in the defense, then arching the ball just out of reach of the Braves, once, twice, three times.
Up a set and leading 24-20 in the second, Coupeville was on the verge of claiming a major win, but La Conner proved to be hard to pin down.
To give the Braves proper credit, they won the match with stellar plays down the stretch, blunting the best the Wolves could throw at them late.
But instead of focusing on the finish, look instead at Drake, a freshman who splits her time between volleyball and cheer.
Bounding skyward, with the match slipping away, she redirected a wayward ball, sending it slicing past the defense for a precision point, before being mobbed by her teammates.
That’s the image to remember as the Wolf JV heads to Friday Harbor this Thursday to wrap up its season.
Because, like much of what came in the first 98.2% of the match, it speaks of a bright future for Coupeville’s young spikers.
Tuesday stats:
Capri Anter — 2 kills, 1 ace
Haylee Armstrong — 2 kills, 3 digs, 3 assists, 3 aces
Lexis Drake — 4 kills, 1 dig, 1 assist, 1 ace
Chloe Marzocca — 3 digs, 1 assist, 1 ace
Myra McDonald — 1 kill
Dakota Strong — 1 kill, 6 digs, 1 assist, 1 ace
Coupeville Sports 