FERGUS FALLS -- The Minnesota West volleyball team stormed out of the gates Wednesday night, winning the first set.
But Fergus Falls rallied for three straight wins, sealing a Southern Division victory, 3-1.
"It was great to come out with that first game," MW head coach Marie Johnson said following the Lady Jays' 21-25, 25-22, 25-18, 25-20 loss. "We knew they were going to come back hard because Fergus wanted that second game really, really bad. I think they very surprised when we came out as strong as we did in the first game, they just came back and fought a little bit harder than we did in the second game."
West won the first game by four points, but the Spartans came back with a three-point victory in Game 2.
"Our girls did great," Johnson said. "They did really, really well talking and moving their feet, but there were times when they started to let up and that's when Fergus would get their runs of about seven or eight points. It's really hard to continue to come back off of runs against you that are seven or eight points long."
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However, the MW serve struggled in the final two games as FF completed the four-set win.
"The last two games, our serve started to hurt us again," the coach said. "We had more serve errors in the last two games than we did the other two games. They weren't terrible, but we had four serve errors in the very last game. We had three serve errors in the third game. Three or four points would have made a huge difference."
MW's serving efforts were led by Sarah Suby, who was 11-for-11 with two aces. Katherine Kazemba was 21-for-23 with one ace.
Michaela Wolff had 20 set assists, while Kristina Skorepa had six kills to lead MW's attack. Alyson Drooger and Kelsey Wolthuizen each had five kills.
Wolthuizen also had four blocks, while Tiffany Harberts added three.
Kazemba led the Lady Jays with 22 digs, while Suby had 17. Kayla VanderVeen added 16 digs for West, which will host Riverland on Friday.
"I am very happy with how the girls played," Johnson said. "They played really, really hard. There were some great volleys back and forth that really made the game seem a lot longer than it even was. They played their hearts out until the very last whistle."
