Volleyball
riarty and setter Emma Johnson make those calls.
“They’re awesome,” said Rydjord. “After every play I go to them and like ‘thank you’ because they really help me out.”
Chappell called the softspoken McKinney a “quiet killer.”
“I am enjoying it a lot because I’ve never played high school volleyball and I love the team,” said the freshman. “They’re all super amazing and really encouraging.”
“It’s such a good group of girls,” Rydjord said. “We have three freshmen and a sophomore and I’m so proud of them. All the seniors, there are seven of us, and we are all so proud. It’s just awesome. And our coaches are just amazing. They encourage us to try our hardest and just have fun.”
One key to the Vacaville sweep was the lack of unforced errors.
“We did really well tonight,” said Chappell. “We really focused on our serving and our serve-receive passing in practice and it really paid off. We only had three errors serving which is phenomenal compared to what we were doing and our serve-receive was on point.”
The back row of Johnson, Moriarty and Tiana Zamora was impenetrable.
“Jordyn is really awesome at digging and servereceive and Tiana has just gotten better every single (match),” Chappell said.
“They’re very tough,” said Vanden co-head coach Christopher Co of Vacaville. “Their passing is solid. We were hoping to try to get some service runs, but we just couldn’t do it. Their back row was just too good.”
Vanden was missing one of its lead setters and an outside hitter.
“We tried to compensate by adding Anaya Thrower to our front-row lineup,” Co said. “Anaya is a freshman with lots of guts.”
Thrower was excellent, contributing nine kills and five blocks, three of them solo. Libero Mariah Navat led the Viking defense with 11 digs. Mora Braggs added five kills.
Co acknowledged that Vacaville is a tough nut to crack.
“They are the returning champs from last year,” he said. “We didn’t get into the serve-receive rut that we got into the first time we met with them, but we couldn’t mount an offense effective enough because they had some great passing in that back row. But the girls did as good as they could trying to hang with them.”
Moriarty led the Bulldog defense with 12 digs and a serve-receive of 2.4. Christiana Cruz had three blocks. Johnson ran the offense with 60 assist attempts and was 16-for-18 serving with three aces. Lili Ayala was outstanding serving, going 16-for-16.
“I’m really excited about finishing out this season,” said Chappell, whose squad travels to Armijo on Friday and then completes the MEL season with three matches next week.
The Vanden junior varsity improved to 6-0 in league play with an exciting 25-19, 23-25, 15-11 victory over Vacaville. The second set was particularly tense, Vacaville winning an incredibly long rally when the score was tied 23-23 before getting the next point for the win.
Vanden’s Breanna Davis was 11-for-11 serving with two aces, three kills and 13 assists. Elina Rodriguez was 12-14 from the service line for the winners with two aces, two kills and a dig. Teammate Jada Cuffie went 7-for-8 serving with nine kills, four blocks, and a dig. Viking Esther Khartoum was 6-for-6 at the service line with four assists.