Lady Indians defeat McClain in 3 sets

The Hillsboro varsity volleyball team secured second place in the tough Frontier Athletic Conference after shutting out McClain, 3-0 in Greenfield Thursday, Oct. 3.

The Lady Indians took game one by a 25-19 final and won game two by a 25-16 count to go up 2-0 in the match. In the third and final game of the match, McClain jumped out and led early, but Hillsboro quickly regrouped toward the middle and had to hold on at the end to win 25-20.

It was a competitive and entertaining match where both teams hustled and played hard the entire time.

“I think everyone played really hard and gave 100-percent effort tonight,” said Hillsboro head coach Heather Jones. “As a team they hustled and really gave everything they had.

“We’ve been struggling some lately in our first couple of sets, and that’s been one of my biggest concerns and our biggest goal to fix. I thought in the third set tonight we seemed to slack off a little early on and made a few costly errors, but overall my girls put it together and finished strong.”

McClain head coach Taylor Alsop, despite disappointed in the result, still was able to find some positives in her team’s effort.

“I think we played today with a lot of up and down moments,” Alsop said. “It seemed like every time we got a little momentum and had a good streak, Hillsboro would come right back and retake that momentum. So, it was a lot of back-and-forth moments for us all night where we had a lot of peaks and valleys.

“I thought Hillsboro played a really strong match, and they seemed to be really prepared and ready to play tonight.

“We had a couple key people out or not 100 percent and my girls were a little taken aback by all the different lineups we were trying to use, and I think Hillsboro were able to take advantage of that,” Alsop continued. “We had some moments when some of our younger players like Anzli (Beatty-Shoemaker) really stepped up, and I thought Anna Eikenberry and some other players looked really solid up front.

“Overall I thought everyone played hard and really stepped up where they were needed. We just had some communication breakdowns that affected us some. I thought our blocking up front was solid, and we were getting a lot of digs from some of their hits, it was just some of those little mistakes that got us.”

McClain (7-12) traveled to Paint Valley on Saturday, Oct. 5 and returns home to play Western Brown on Monday, Oct. 7 in the final regular-season game.

Hillsboro improves to 12-6 overall and 7-2 in the FAC, which is good for second place in the conference (first is Miami Trace).

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