Mount wins thriller

Melnychuk inspires Mounties to home win

WOONSOCKET — The Mount St. Charles girls volleyball team dominated the first two games and built a 19-10 lead in the third game in Monday night’s Division I clash with South Kingstown, so it was no surprise the Mounties remained undefeated.

What was a surprise was that the Mounties didn’t walk away victorious after the third game – or even the fourth.

Led by senior outside hitter Chloe Greene and senior middle Courtney Essex, the athletic Rebels controlled the net against the inexperienced Mounties in the second half of the third game and the entire fourth game. The Rebels built an early two-point lead in the final game when the Mounties rediscovered their form that had them on the precipice of a sweep.

Senior setter Ally Melnychuk produced seven kills, 25 assists and eight aces, while Mallory Mongeon and Amanda Pierce combined for 21 kills to lead the Mounties to a 25-19, 25-18, 22-25, 18-25, 15-10 home victory.

“Volleyball is such a mind game because if you’re down and losing all those points, you get down,” Melnychuk said of the wild swings in the match. “It’s a mind game where you try to pick everyone up, but it’s so hard. In the third our energy was just drained and everyone was making little mistakes. We had a pep talk before the last game and we just played really well. We gave it our all at the end.”

“The game is fast paced and there’s a point basically every second, so it’s super easy to get unmotivated really fast and really easy to get it back up,” said senior middle Lauren Cunanan, who rebounded from a rough serving night with big serves late in the fifth. “The timeouts certainly helped because [coach Josh D’Abate] and the team motivated us to get it back and bring it together. We just kept our minds focused on the next point.”

Mount St. Charles (3-0 Division I) already eclipsed last season’s win total (2-13) in the second week of the season. The Mounties head on the road for the first time this season Wednesday night when they travel to Providence to take on a La Salle team that appears to be one of the contenders who could face reigning state champion North Kingstown in the state final. The Mounties visit the powerhouse Skippers next week.

The key going into Wednesday’s match is consistency for D’Abate because, for the second straight match, his team’s execution and effort level dropped in the third game and made what should’ve been a comfortable win into something needlessly more difficult.

“We have to figure out how to get ready of the complacency in the third game because we did the same thing against East Providence,” D’Abate said. “We talked between four and five and I told them to show people who we are, that we’re not going to give up win or lose. We needed to grind it out until the end. We weren’t going to just give it away and I think the girls took that message to heart.”

South Kingstown (0-2 Division I) led the fourth game from the opening built and blew away the Mounties, and they built on that momentum into the final game. Thanks to a lift call on the Mounties and a couple of good attacks by the visitors, the Rebels built leads of 3-1 and 4-2. SK led 6-5, but that would be the visitors’ last lead of the match thanks to Mount’s impressive ball control, which went missing late in the third game and fourth game.

Brilliant defensive plays by Pierce, Melnychuk, Cunanan and Mongeon sparked a 7-1 Mount run to build a 12-7 lead.

“We just calmed down and focused on the game,” said Pierce, who was the best player on the court in the first two-plus games of the match. “This is a whole new team this year and we’re not expected to beat some of these teams, so we need to pull together and play as a team to win these games.”

The Mounties scored the first four points of the match, and even though the Rebels battled back to take an early one-point lead, the hosts were the better team in the opening game. Whether it was Pierce’s pin-point attacks or the surprisingly effective tactic of having senior libero Joy Teixiera setting Melnychuk for back-row attacks, Mount was scoring against the taller Rebels.

Even though Mount made seven service errors in the second game, South Kingstown never led. The hosts built leads of 7-2, 12-6 and 17-10 on their way to a dominant win. The third game was following a similar pattern, with the Mounties building leads of 10-5 and 19-10, but the Rebels scored 15 of the game’s final 18 points to force the Mounties to show some resolve to earn the win in five.

“That was a really good win right there,” Melnychuk said. “I don’t think a lot of teams were expecting us to win that game, so I think we showed some teams that we’ve really gotten a lot better.”

“This was so much better than [a sweep] because it took so much hard work,” Cunanan said. “This will help us going forward.”