BROOKVILLE – The No. 5 seed Versailles Lady Tigers earned a 3-0 first-round OHSAA DIII volleyball tournament win over the No. 15 seed Greenon Lady Knights in a Wednesday night matchup.
“Hopefully, we’re here for a few more weeks and they had that mentality tonight,” said Versailles coach, Liz McNeilan. “A little nervous at first, got those nerves out and they took care of the game.”
Versailles was quickly down 0-3 to open the first set of play with the Lady Knights expanding its lead to 7-3 and 13-11 before the Lady Tigers would knot the score at 13-13, 14-4, and 15-15 and earn its first lead of the night at 16-15.
“We have a lot in first time tournament, we have a lot of girls that this is the first time seeing the court,” said McNeilan. “I felt the nerves, even at school. We were together a couple hours before the match, you could definitely feel it.”
Versailles took advantage of a 9-3 scoring run resulting in a 25-18 Lady Tigers first-set win to take a 1-0 lead.
“We weren’t executing the game plan at first,” McNeilan noted. “We came around and started executing the game plan. When we started executing that game plan along with that team confidence – I was very proud of them for turning it around.”
The Lady Tigers opened set No. 2 with a 9-0 run with Brooke Briscoe at the serving line bringing a timeout from the Greenon bench. Versailles pushed its lead to 19-3 and a second Greenon timeout with the Lady Knights closing out the set 7-6 with Versailles going up 2-0 with a 25-10 win.
“Our slogan this year is ‘be the first’ and our first goal is to be the first to five,” said McNeilan. “That is what we’ve been focusing on. Tonight coming out in that second game and Brooke going on a nine-point – her serving for those points from the service line, that’s when you score in those chunks and it brings confidence to everybody on the court. Just take that deep breath and be successful with the next point focusing on continuing that momentum and they did that with the service line and chunking it out back there at that line getting all those points in a row.”
Versailles wasted little time putting a win in the book with a 25-7 third-set win to advance in tournament play.
“Taylor (Wagner) did a great job,” McNeilan said. “She was working her tail off, she’s an athlete and I’m thankful she’s on our side.”
Versailles had 11 aces and limited it service errors to a total of four on the night.
“We run a lot of drills in practice and we can miss deep but we try not to miss short – stay aggressive, stay aggressive, stay aggressive,” Coach McNeilan stated. “They did that tonight and it proved to help us out.”
The Lady Tigers will take on the No. 18 seed Middletown Madison Lady Mohawks, on Saturday, October 21 at Brookville High School with a 2:30 p.m. start time.
