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[ PREVIOUS STORIES ]

09-05-03: Redskins continue the recent trend

By RANDY BRUNS
Standard Correspondent

MARIA STEIN — The St. Henry Redskins came calling on the Marion Local Flyers at the Hangar on Thursday night to continue a volleyball rivalry that’s been back-and-forth the past three years.
In each of those three years, St. Henry has won the Midwest Athletic Conference battle while Marion rebounded to take a sectional tournament game later in the season.
After round one this year, the trend continued as the Redskins pummeled the Flyers 15-6, 15-7 in two games that saw the visitors pull away midway through the action and win going away.
St. Henry’s record is now 5-1 overall and 2-0 in the MAC, while Marion falls to 4-2 and 1-1 in league play.
“With the lineup we have right now, everybody can play their position really well,” said St. Henry coach Lori Schwieterman. “It helps us that at three of our positions we have front row players and back row players, so we can specialize and put up a big block. When we’re on, we’re going to be consistently good.”
Consistent, indeed. St. Henry was solid all night in all phases of the game, something Marion coach Amy Kucharski couldn’t say about her charges.
“St. Henry is an excellent team and they played awesome tonight,” said Kucharski. “They had good serving, setting, defense, blocking, just everything. It wasn’t just one thing with us, either, it was a combination of things that just weren’t very good. It just wasn’t our night, that’s for sure.”
Game one started out with a pair of scoring runs from both teams that resulted in a 6-4 Redskin lead. From there, the visitors took off and vaulted to an 11-6 advantage that forced Kucharski to spend her second timeout. The break didn’t help the Flyers, as the Redskins took control with a kill and a stuff block, and after two Flyer hitting errors, the game was over.
The second game began with the Flyers taking a 5-1 lead, thanks to four errant Redskin kill attempts. A timeout by Schwie-terman fixed things quickly, though, as the visitors rallied to grab a 7-5 lead. A Marion ace got them to within 7-6, but four St. Henry points brought the bulge to 11-6. Another Marion ace followed, but St. Henry’s attack never relented and provided them with the four more points they needed for a victory.
Although the whole St. Henry squad hit well, the most impressive performances came from the “Lethal Lindsays” — Lindsay Hess and Lindsay Puthoff. Hess, a senior, and Puthoff, a junior, controlled the net all night long, as the two combined for 16 kills and four stuff blocks. Puthoff almost single-handedly finished off the first game, recording a kill to get the serve back and then notching two more kills and a stuff block in the final five-point flurry.
“They’ve got to dominate, and I’ve told them that,” said Schwie-terman of the front row pair. “They’ve got to be all over the net, blocking and moving. We work on that every week in practice, and I thought the whole team blocked and moved well tonight.”
For her part, Kucharski will try to take the Flyers’ subpar performance and turn it into a learning experience.
“Obviously one of our goals was to beat St. Henry in the regular season for the first time in who knows when,” said Kucharski. “That’s not going to happen this season, but there’s a lot of season to be played and you never know what’s going to happen in the conference. We just need to stay positive and learn from this. We learned from our loss to Lehman (this year) and we came back and beat them.”
Both teams return to action next week on the road. St. Henry will travel to Sidney on Tuesday to take on Lehman, while Marion motors to Darke County on Monday where it will face Ansonia.

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