NEW PALESTINE — Playing at home in a big conference and county rivalry match, the New Palestine Dragons came out fired up.
Greenfield-Central wasn’t deterred.
The Dragons took the first set in Thursday’s Hoosier Heritage Conference volleyball match. Once the Cougars grabbed momentum early in the second set, they never really gave it back.
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A furious New Palestine rally in the fourth set fell short, and the visiting Cougars picked up a 3-1 win against the Dragons, 25-18, 14-25, 25-18, 25-19.
“It’s a great feeling. We lost a lot of seniors, and it took a lot on us, a lot of effort and a lot of teamwork to get to where we’re at now,” Greenfield-Central junior Makayla Price said. “Tonight we played more like a team than we probably ever have this season. Coming out and playing like that feels great.”
After a back-and-forth first 10 points, the Dragons opened up a lead as big as 10 in the first set in part due to five kills from Rachel Popp. The Cougars cut an 18-8 deficit down with two kills from Ava Antic, one from Price and blocks from Price and Kenley Carpenter.
The Dragons held on and took the first set off a Cougars’ service error, but momentum was starting to shift.
“I think we played one of our best sets that first set. Everything kind of went our way,” New Palestine coach Kelli Whitaker said. “Stuff was kind of going off their block, we were finding holes on the floor, and it just went really well that first set. The second set, things really got away from us. We knew that they were going to come out and battle, and we were really inconsistent throughout the whole match.”
Things turned in the Cougars’ favor with Antic serving in the second set, as her ace helped spark a four-point run to open up a lead and start pulling away. A 5-5 tie turned into a 15-6 Greenfield-Central lead. The Dragons called two timeouts to try to get back into it, but a pair of aces from Molly Schwarzkopf helped keep the Cougars momentum moving forward.
“We never gave it back,” Greenfield-Central coach Ron Heck said of the game’s momentum. “They were embarrassed with how we performed in that first set, but we made an adjustment going into set two.”
The Dragons had success in set one with outside hitters tipping the ball over Greenfield-Central blockers. The Cougars shifted their defense to take that play away starting with the second set.
It worked.
Greenfield-Central opened an early lead in the third set and never relinquished it. They led 22-11 before the Dragons staged a rally, scoring five straight points to force a timeout. The rally fell short, 25-18.
The Cougars tried to put the match away early in the fourth set, continuing their momentum and pulling ahead 11-3 and eventually 18-6.
The Dragons again staged a big comeback, responding with four straight points and cutting the lead to four at 21-17. The hosts had the serve trailing 23-19 but hit the net, and the Cougars closed things out on Antic’s serve.
The Cougars had 14 aces to five for New Palestine. Price matched the Dragons entire game total by herself in set three. She finished the match — her first back at the outside position after dealing with an injury — with 12 kills and five aces.
Antic had 15 kills and four aces. Morgan Hornaday had 23 assists and Ali Knecht added 21 for the Cougars in what Heck called the best overall passing performance from his team this season.
“I thought our setters really distributed the ball really well,” Heck said. “We had 44 assists between the two setters, and that put us over 50 kills for all of our attackers.”
The Dragons got 14 kills from Kaelyn Armstrong and nine each from Dodd and Kennedy Stephenson. Stephenson added four blocks, Sarah Adam had 35 assists and Grace Myers had 21 digs for New Palestine (5-3, 0-1 HHC).
With the win, Greenfield-Central improved to 7-2 on the year and 1-1 in HHC play. More importantly, they hope they sent a message with the resilience they showed in bouncing back from the first-set loss against their county rivals.
“We are not one to back down. We did not want to give up,” Price said. “Coming from a sectional championship, we felt a lot on us to come out here and prove that it wasn’t just the seniors that did that for us and that we are still the group that we were last year. We were just trying to prove a point. We’re not going down that easily.”