HEGINS — Junior middle hitter Taryn Herb said head coach Richard Berg did not have to say much to his Millersburg girls’ volleyball team before Thursday’s Schuylkill League Division III showdown with Tri-Valley.
“He didn’t really say much because he knew we could do it,” Herb said after the Indians’ 25-20, 25-20, 25-23 sweep of the host Bulldogs. “We all knew we could do it. These guys (her teammates) said that we know how they play and they know how we play. it was actually a teammate that said that and we just had to play fine.”
Millersburg (12-2, 10-2 D-III) then accomplished its mission and took a two-game lead in the division with just two division matches left. The Indians therefore can clinch the championship outright and a berth in the Schuylkill playoffs with a victory over Williams Valley on Tuesday.
“We’re just trying to win one game at a time and go forward,” Berg said.
However, after needing five sets to defeat the Bulldogs on Sept. 8 at Millersburg and then dispatching defending division champion Halifax in five more sets on Tuesday, there was little doubt Thursday’s match would be the biggest step toward the Division III pennant.
“It was just a matter of playing our game and playing it better,” Herb said, “because we knew if we played our game, we could do it by ourselves. But just talking, we needed to talk and we needed to move our feet because we knew they are a scrappy team, and compliments to them for being such good hitting placers. We needed to move our feet.”
Tri-Valley head coach Heather Drumheller said her squad committed just eight serving errors, but most seemed to happen at critical moments. That added to the challenge of facing an Indian front line of Herb and seniors Samantha Hines and Jessica Millard.
“They were smart with their hitting,” Drumheller said. “They really mix it up. 22 (Herb) can hit really hard, but the others just like picked their spots and picked us apart, really. We couldn’t play defense. That was the big difference here.”
However, on the scoreboard, the differences were small. Most of the major service runs only allowed that team to rebound from deficits that weren’t that large.
In the opening set, neither team led by more than three points before a tie at 17 was the seventh deadlock of the set. At that point, Tri-Valley committed a setting error and three hitting mistakes, allowing Millersburg to take a 21-17 lead that the Indians turned into a victory on Hines’ fifth kill of the set and one of her 14 in the match.
More of the same ensued in the second set. A four-point edge by Tri-Valley was the largest before Millersburg rallied to tie the match at 19 during a five-point service run by Herb. She continued the run, capping it with two aces for a 22-19 lead that Millersburg held to the finish.
In the third set, Tri-Valley rode a five-point streak by server Reagan Newswanger to open the set, but Millersburg eventually tied the set 7-7. Millersburg then surged to a five-point edge at 19-14, but Tri-Valley came back to tie 21-21. At that point, Herb delivered two kills for a lead that Millersburg kept to the end.
In the match, Herb finished with 13 kills, 15 digs and six aces. Hines added 14 digs to her kills and senior setter Amber Roach had two kills, two aces and 27 assists, moving within two of 1,000 for her three-year career.
Newswanger had nine digs and four aces among her 17 service points for Tri-Valley, Maddie Sheib added six kills and two blocks and Madison Deibert posted 10 digs and seven kills, but the Bulldogs know now their future probably does not include the Schuylkill League playoffs.
“We want to finish the season on a positive note,” Drumheller said. “Now we’ve got to concentrate on the end of the season and districts.”
Millersburg won the JV match 2-1.