Daily Local News (West Chester, PA)
Whippets’ ‘off’ night comes at worst possible time
DOWNINGTOWN » Hailey Lewis sensed something was up in warm-ups, and teammate Aly Reardon said she could tell quite early that the team was just a little bit off.
In the one-and-done portion of the District 1 Class 4A Volleyball Playoffs, few teams would be able to survive the unexplained, but sometimes unavoidable, team-wide letdown, and that’s exactly what happened on Tuesday with Downingtown West.
Playing at home against lower-seeded Central Bucks East, the 14th seeded Whippets were blanked 3-0 by the Patriots. Their season ends with an 11-6 overall mark.
“Everything was just a bit off,” agreed West head coach David Parrish.
“We were just out of our game,” added Lewis, a junior. “I definitely got the feeling in warm-ups that we were off. It certainly wasn’t one of our better warm-ups.”
Through the first two games, it looked like a pair of evenly matched opponents. But C.B. East put on a late flourish in both to take command, and the Whippets never recovered. The scores were 25-22, 2522, 25-16.
Now 14-9 overall, the 19th seeded Patriots advance to round two on Thursday to take on No. 2 Pennsbury.
“We just made a lot of uncharacteristic errors — a lot of hitting mistakes,” Parrish explained. “We knew (East) had some good blockers, but they didn’t block as much as we thought. Maybe we were trying to avoid the blocks so much that we hit a lot of balls out of bounds.
“Looking at the stats, it’s not pretty.”
Downingtown West looked pretty good early on, racing out to a 7-3 lead in game one, thanks to six consecutive points off Lewis’ jump-serve. The Whippets were unable to maintain that pace, however, and there were 12 ties down the stretch, with the last coming at 22-22. That’s when East scored the final three, including a kill and a block by the Pat’s six-foot middle hitter Jenn Krzeminski.
Game two followed a similar pattern, including 11 ties, but the Patriots finished with a 9-7 rally to close it out.
“We were up in both, but down the stretch we just didn’t handle the ball well,” Parrish said.
Clearly shocked, West surrendered the first five points in the third, trailed by as much as nine and never got any closer than 19-14.
“(East) kept us on our toes the whole time,” Reardon said. “We hurt ourselves in the first two games and it was hard to come back in the third. We gave it all we had, but we just didn’t have enough tonight.”
Parrish added: “Usually we are very good at siding-out in our first rotation, but we could not find a pass-set-hit to get out of that rotation. I called a timeout and told them to fight hard. We made a bit of a run but it was a little too late.”
Reardon paced the Whippets with 14 kills and two aces, and Lewis chipped in with 10 kills and four blocks. Senior Kenzie Pincura added six kills and eight digs in her final high school outing along with fellow co-captain Chloe O’Donnell.
“I thank our seniors for what they’ve done the last four year,” Parrish said. “They took this program to our first-ever states last year and we went deep in the district playoffs.
“I also told our returning players to work hard in the offseason and remember what this night feels like because it hurts.”