Late surges by 2A Tumwater volleyball team pin 3-0 loss on 4A Olympia
An early-season match between Tumwater and Olympia high schools is a South Sound volleyball tradition.
For the 2015 edition of this nonleague, cross-classification rivalry Thursday night, each team was coming off a Tuesday victory, each by 3-1 scores, and each after dropping the first game in the match and winning the next three.
Class 2A defending state champion Tumwater followed its Tuesday victory over Curtis with a 25-23, 25-14, 25-17 win over the 4A Bears in Olympia.
“We improved over Tuesday,” Thunderbirds coach Tana Otton said. “We blocked in position much better, and that makes a huge difference in our team.”
Olympia, on the other hand, took a step back from its win over Rogers, according to coach Laurie Creighton.
“Absolutely the wrong direction from what we did on Tuesday,” she said. “It’s disappointing how we played tonight. We’re capable of better than that.”
Tumwater got 18 kills from Kennedy Croft, 32 overall, and Olympia countered with 25 kills as a team, one fewer than leading hitter Lauren Wilson had against Rogers. Wilson had nine kills Thursday to lead the Bears.
In the first game, Tumwater raced to a 12-4 lead behind a cluster of Croft winners. Olympia played its strongest volleyball of the night to pull into a tie at 17 on a service ace by Wilson, then took a 23-21 lead. The T-Birds scored the last four points of the game, including two Croft kills, to win.
Olympia led the second game early at 8-4, and trailed at 13-11 before Tumwater outscored the Bears 12-3 down the stretch.
Strong play at the net by Maddy Reeves and Lydia Soto kept the Bears close in Game 3, but a trio of kills by Tumwater’s Brooke Hare fueled an 8-2 Thunderbirds run to close out the match.
Otton found much to like in her team’s play.
“We serve-received a lot better tonight,” she said, adding that her team played looser than in the Curtis match.
“I like how in-control the girls played,” Otton said “That makes me at ease as a coach. They carried themselves like they were going to win. They’ve bought into that expectation.”
Creighton appreciated how her team battled in the first game, but otherwise found little to praise.
“We did not side-out well,” she said, “a result of not passing particularly well.”
Creighton said her team rated a 2.2 on passing against Rogers (on a three-point scale), a number she’d be happy with any day. The falloff was notable Thursday, she said.
“Offense is dependent on your serve-receive passing,” she said. “We had a tremendous amount of unforced errors tonight.”
This story was originally published September 10, 2015 at 10:08 PM with the headline "Late surges by 2A Tumwater volleyball team pin 3-0 loss on 4A Olympia."