Knights down Lions
LINCOLN — The No. 3 Lincoln girls volleyball team was hoping that the serve-receive and communication errors that allowed No. 6 Exeter-West Greenwich to take the opening set in Wednesday’s Division II preliminary round match would go away as the playoff jitters wore off.
Unfortunately for the Lions, outside of a dominant performance in the third set, their mistakes were too much to overcome against a Scarlet Knight team led by talented middle hitter Avery LeBlanc.
Senior outside hitter Olivia Wodogaza and setter Hannah Schermerhorn played well, but the Lions suffered a 25-16, 25-20, 13-25, 2520 defeat to the Scarlet Knights at Lincoln Middle School.
It proved to be a bad night for the Blackstone Valley’s other Division II teams because No. 5 Central Falls was swept by Johnston and now the Panthers will travel to the Broncodome Friday night to take on top-seeded Burrillville. In Providence, No. 6 North Smithfield took the third set from Classical, but the Purple used a dominant performance from Janai Price to down Hope Trowbridge and the Northmen in four sets.
The Lions, who came up just a few points short of winning the 2018 Division II title, actually led the opening set, 6-3, when a service error sparked an 8-1 run for the visitors. EWG went up 11-7, forcing first-year Lincoln coach Lyndsey Sweeney to use one of her two timeouts in the set. The Knights went up by as many as seven points before Alaina Winn went on a service run to get the Lions back in the set. The visitors, however, won nine of the last 11 points to take the opening set.
The Knights scored the first four points of the second set and went on to build leads of 11-5 and 15-10 before the Lions closed the gap to 20-18. The Knights, however, responded by scoring the set’s final two points.
Wodogaza, Schermerhorn, Lexie Walters and the Lions delivered a superb performance in the third set to get back into the match. The Lions, thanks to good defense and precise hitting, jumped out to a 10-3 advantage. Lincoln never allowed the lead to slip below seven points on its way to the victory.
Exeter-West Greenwich, behind the play of LeBlanc, Morgan Rosato and Emily Jedson, took advantage of Lincoln’s defensive mistakes to build a 10-4 lead in the fourth set. Lincoln battled back to tie the set at 13 on a Wodogaza kill, but the Knights answered with three straight points to take a lead they would never relinquish.