Miller, Mount top Townies
Senior delivers team-high 15 kills in Division I sweep
WOONSOCKET — Issa Miller’s role with the Mount St. Charles girls volleyball program has slowly grown since she was a rarely-used freshman watching her older sister, former Mount All-State setter Alex Miller, guide the Mounties to the state semifinals.
After playing an integral role last season, Miller has become the unquestioned team leader and go-to hitter when the Mounties need a point.
“Last year with all of the seniors we had, I was just a player and now I need to be more of a leader on the court with rotations and motivation,” Miller said. Wednesday night. “It’s a lot of fun to have a bigger role with the team and get more playing time and have more plays for you. It’s really a lot of fun.”
“She’s been involved with us since she was a freshman and she’s started since she was a sophomore,” Mount coach Josh D’Abate said. “She can handle the work load of taking more of the court defensively and getting 30 to 40 swings and being able to convert on a good number of them. It’s nice to have that kind of player because she’s a calming presence that helps the younger players because they really look up to her. She makes it easy on them.”
Miller only had 29 swings Wednesday night, but that’s because the Mounties needed little more than an hour to dispatch visiting East Providence, 25-22, 25-13, 25-21. Miller delivered kills on the penultimate and final points of the match, finishing the evening with a team-high 15 kills and five digs. Senior setter Emma Picard dished out 29 assists.
Mount St. Charles (1-1 Division I) heads to the Wellness Center tonight for their first road match of the campaign when they face rival Cumberland, whose coach, Ruth Plante, was in attendance Wednesday. After graduating a number of talented starters, the Mounties have shown there’s plenty of talent in the program after pushing reigning state champion North Kingstown to four games in the season opener.
“We knew we lost a lot of great players and great people last year, so we knew we needed to step up this year,” Miller said. “That mentality is kind of pushing us to play harder because we know we need to step up. I was really impressed with how we played [against NK] despite the loss, it was a really positive game for us. We thought we were going to get swept, but we hung with them.”
East Providence (0-2 Division I) still hasn’t won a game in a pair of matches, and the Townies made far too many serving, passing and hitting er- rors to ride back down Route 146 with a victory. After a blowout loss in the second game, coach Alex Butler’s crew earned a 19-18 lead in the third game when the Townies blocked an attempted setter dump by Picard.
Mount St. Charles answered with three straight points and went on to secure the victory thanks to a pair of kills from Miller. Fellow outside hitter Alli Melnychuk had 11 kills and five digs, while junior right-side hitter Marissa Tessier had five kills and three aces.
Even though Mount trailed for a total of two points in the first two games, D’Abate said communication was a big issue.
“We did some good things and I thought our serve-receive was pretty good – it wasn’t on par with Friday night,” D’Abate said. “If Friday night was an A, this was a B-plus. I thought the one thing we didn’t do well was communicate. We struggled out there. A lot of balls we played and got good touches to get ourselves in system on Friday, we just scrambled on tonight. We need to work on that.”
The Townies led 1-0 and 8-7 in the opening game, but that was as good as it got for the inexperienced side because hitting errors and serving errors allowed Mount to jump ahead 14-9. Even though EP closed the gap to one (17-16), Mount held on for the victory.
The home side jumped out to a 7-1 advantage in the second game and continued to pull away. Behind the play of Picard, Miller and Tessier, the Mounties stretched the lead out to 17-7 before cruising to a win.
“As a young team, we have to learn to win. This was a good step in that direction,” D’Abate said. “I would’ve liked to see us after getting that second game by a pretty good score keep our foot on the gas and really take advantage of it. We didn’t do that, but I’m glad we responded to win the third and get out of here.”