HEGINS — Tri-Valley dedicated a lot of time at practice over the past four days working on serving aggressively.
The Dawgs had struggled to keep aggressive serves in bounds during the regular season, and coach Heather Drumheller wanted her girls to make sure it wasn’t a problem in the postseason.
Service errors tend to abruptly bring to an end a team’s season in late October.
Tri-Valley’s extra attention at the line paid dividends as Maddie Deibert recorded seven of the Dawgs’ 23 total aces, contributing to a 25-18, 24-26, 25-16, 25-10 victory over Minersville in the District 11 Class A girls’ volleyball quarterfinals Thursday evening.
Kathryn Sherry contributed five aces, Alexis Artz added four, Reagan Newswanger tallied three and Jordyn Ebersole finished with two as No. 4-seeded Tri-Valley (15-4) advanced to Tuesday’s semifinals against top-seeded Marian at Minersville High School at 7 p.m..
“It’s something we’ve been working on at practice all week,” Drumheller said. “We’ve been working on serving more aggressively and keeping them in bounds. What was happening was when we were trying to serve aggressively, they were going out of bounds. We really worked on serving a lot. I know it’s a crucial part of the game ... if you could get a couple of runs there and get some passing down.”
Tri-Valley’s hard serves led to passing errors by No. 5 Minersville (14-7), which rarely was able to get into system and run its offense effectively.
“Passing tonight ... we didn’t pass well at all,” Minersville coach Kenton Martin said.
“When we got into our offense we were OK. We struggled all night to get to that point. We struggled off serve-receive.”
Still, the Dawgs were unable to take command of the match until late in the third set. Back-to-back hitting errors by the Battlin’ Miners turned the third set around as Tri-Valley scored eight of the set’s final nine points.
That win helped turn momentum the Dawgs’ way after Minersville captured the second set after fending off a rally.
“The second game, we weren’t taking care of the ball,” Drumheller said. “There were a lot of hitting errors in that second game. It was a lot of us. There were a lot of hitting errors. We just wanted to clean that up. They did that more effectively the next two games.”
Tri-Valley also made a slight alteration to its lineup for the third and fourth sets, inserting Lizzie Otto into the lineup as a second setter to help the team get into system.
The change paid dividends as the Dawgs handled Minersville’s serves better and passed the ball more crisply. Six different Tri-Valley players recorded kills in the set, with Courtney Schweikert collecting four of her 11 kills and Cat Troutman putting down two of her match-high 12.
“What we did for the third and fourth game is we put our other setter in to help with serve receive,” Drumheller said, “and she was able to make some nice plays and give the hitters some balls they could put down.”
Tri-Valley then took command of the deciding set with a 10-1 rally to extend a 6-5 lead to 16-6.
Newswanger finished the night with 25 assists, while Artz added 26 digs for the Dawgs.
For Minersville, Meg Schwalm tallied 38 digs and two aces, Emily Bartashus added 21 digs and nine kills, Erica Nettles posted five kills and two aces and Cassidy Mason added nine assists.
“This one hurts, but we improved throughout the season,” Martin said. “The kids continued to fight, work and strived to improve. They did that throughout the whole season.”