Varsity Volleyball: Knights win 5-set thriller over Liberty

By Ben Spector
Winning After MidKnight

 

At times it wasn’t pretty and it times it was obvious that the game that was being played at Ron Engle Court at Middletown High School was one at the start of the season as errors were everywhere.

But, the one thing that couldn’t be said of the Middletown High School Knights Varsity Volleyball team’s 3-2 (25-19, 25-20, 19-25, 30-32, 15-9) win over the Liberty High School Lions is that it wasn’t fun.

After a back-and-forth fourth set that resulted in the Lions forcing the penultimate fifth set, Middletown would take control midway through the fifth set and never look back giving them the win and putting their record at 1-0 for the season.

In the beginning, it didn’t seem as if the contest would be much of anything as the Knights roared out to a 2-0 lead after the first two sets using Liberty errors and mistakes on returns and services to play to the Knights’ strengths.

Multiple times during those first two sets, Liberty gave the Knights’ free balls in which Middletown could then orchestrate their own attack (which usually ended with Knights senior Erika Pritchard  getting a kill) and Middletown was feeding off of it as if not for a late rally in the second set, the margin of victory for the Knights would have been much, much higher.

The third set would represent a dramatic turn as the whole course of the game turned on a hinge. With the Knights staring a chance to clinch the game and get out of their first game without dropping a set in the face, they would falter as service errors and communication mistakes allow Liberty to win the third set.

Service errors and small mistakes such as was seen with communication between teammates on both sides defined the game as it was obvious to anyone watching the game that both teams were very raw and played a game that was nowhere even close to the best overall game that they could’ve played.

That fact is what makes how fun the fourth and fifth sets were very exciting because even with the quality of volleyball not being as high as Middletown head coach Jamie Pryor and Liberty head coach Dani Forney would’ve liked the volleyball was still enjoyable with Ron Engle Court being as loud as it has ever been for an early season September match.

In the fourth set both teams would run with each other neck-and-neck the whole way with neither team getting more than a three point lead over the course of the set. Middletown would have multiple match points including at 24-23, 26-25, and 27-26 but could never grab the lead as multiple service errors and Liberty kills kept the game tied up until the 30-30 mark.

At that point, Middletown would commit another service error to give the Lions set point and a Liberty ace giving the Lions the fourth set and setting up the decisive fifth set as the game rolled into its’ third hour of action.

The fourth set was also a strange one as in the middle of the set with the Lions’ leading the Knights by a 16-14 score, play was stopped for the better part of ten minutes due to a perceived rotation error by Middletown, one which the referees’ then discussed with the final verdict being a replay of the point with the rotation issue.

On a night that was filled with drama there wouldn’t be much of it in the fifth set as the Knights would jump out to a commanding 10-6 lead in the first to fifteen set, let the lead slip at its’ closest to 10-8 and then take hold of the game to win 15-9.

In a way that was true to the strange, off-the-walls nature of the match the final point for the Knights came on a violation by Liberty giving the Knights an anti-climactic finish to a game that was the essence of a roller-coaster ride.