FORTVILLE — It’s been seven up and seven down for the Mt. Vernon Marauders volleyball team.
Ranked No. 10 in the Indiana High School Volleyball Coaches Association (IHSVCA) poll, Mt. Vernon picked up its seventh win in seven tries, this one a 3-0 victory at home Tuesday against Guerin Catholic, who is receiving votes in the Class 3A poll.
The Marauders won by set scores of 25-16, 25-18, 25-19.
Guerin Catholic dropped to 2-5.
It was the Marauders fifth sweep of the season, including three 2-0 victories to win the Cardinal Ritter Tournament on Saturday. Mt. Vernon is 18-2 in sets played.
Mt. Vernon got out to early comfortable leads in each of the first two sets, but had to work a little harder in the third, breaking a 13-13 tie with a pair of service aces from Lillie Perdue to highlight a 13-6 run to end the match.
“They’re a scrappy team,” Mt. Vernon head coach Eric Bulmahn said of the Golden Eagles. “They have a lot of young players. A lot of times if you don’t have a rivalry with somebody, players come out flat and you go through the motions.
“(Guerin Catholic) is a good young team. I don’t think we took them lightly. We didn’t have the emotion to come up and get them, but we did what we needed to do to get the win.”
The Marauders showed a versatile attack in the first set. They had 12 points off kills from five different players. Cecilia Bulmahn had four in the opening frame. Claire Ertel had three. Setter Victoria Bulmahn and Rachel Pilkington each had two and Macy Lyons had one.
For the match, eight different Marauders had kills. Cecilia Bulmahn led the way with 12. Ertel had nine, with only one hitting error, and Pilkington had four without an attack miscue. Victoria Bulmahn, middle hitters Olivia Yeley and Lyons and right side hitters Delaney Bowser and Meredith Hohnbaum all had one or more kills.
“We have to be able to run any position,” coach Bulmahn said. “We’re so outside hitter heavy, we’ve got to get the middles and the right sides involved to make it tougher for them to defend. We’re trying to get Macy to grow and be our second threat in the middle (along with Yeley) is a big factor for us.
“We have to spread it around and can’t just depend on our outsides.”
Lyons had three kills on six tries with just one error.
“They’re trying to get me to hit a little more,” Lyons said. “It’s making me better. Though I did hit some out, it’s helping me know what to do and hit around the blocks.”
Ertel led in digs with 12 and Sophie Schultz, who was the libero in the first two sets, had 10 digs. Ertel also had five of the team’s 10 service aces. Schultz had three and Perdue had two. Victoria Bulmahn had 29 assists and three blocks.
“They were good,” Lyons said of the Golden Eagles. “I think we could improve and we may have gone down a little bit (in our play) from previous matches.
“I don’t know (why we were a little off), but we kept picking each other up.”
While coach Bulmahn didn’t give the team a perfect score for the match, the Marauders remain perfect on the season.
“The seniors have all been through this. Last year we started off 10-0,” he said. “We’ve got some really tough matches coming up so we’ll get more of a test on where we are right now.”
The Marauders open Hoosier Heritage Conference play Thursday, at home, against Pendleton Heights. The Arabians are 5-0 and have won 15 of 16 sets played.
