Viking netters finish 1-7 at Sprawl, lose in five sets to Bloomer

After two full days of games at the UW-Stout Sprawl in Menononie August 30-31 against teams from all divisions in the state, the Colfax volleyball team ended the tournament with a record of 1-7. Moving into individual match play, they traveled to Bloomer Sept. 3 and lost a close, hard fought match in five sets to the Blackhawks.

 UW-Sprawl

Going 0-4 on Friday with a match consisting of winning two of three games, Colfax lost two games to Rice Lake (25-12, 26-24), Oshkosh West (25-13, 25-18) and Luck, who ended up placing first (25-9, 25-20) before winning their first set against Turtle Lake (25-18) and dropping the next two (25-22, 15-7). Going into pool play on Saturday based on their record, they lost the first set to Oshkosh Lourdes (25-23), won the second by the same score (25-23) and lost the third (15-7). They finally came up with a match win over North Crawford, losing the first set (25-20), then winning the second and third (25-21, 15-12). They then got a taste of some Dunn-St. Croix Conference competition as they faced defending champs Elk Mound and they won the first set (25-23) but dropped the final two (25-22, 15-9).

Kori Buchanan led the Vikings in kill shots with 15 and finished with nine service aces, while Taylor Shipman and Chey Olson both had 13 kills each. Dannielle Dachel set her teammates up 82 times while Emily Tuschl collected 24 digs from the back row and Olson and Alexis Rudi added 16 apiece. Olson led in blocks with seven solos and five assists. As a team, Colfax served 92%.

“This tournament is always an opportunity for us to see where our strengths and weaknesses are,” Colfax coach Pam Meredith said. “Our strengths seem to be our cohesiveness as a group. We have a great group of girls who work well together. Our weaknesses are our inability to communicate throughout a rally, our overall lack of experience in reading the game defensively and offensively and not being able to to close a set/match by putting together a string of points. But those are things that can be worked on as the season progresses and if we can improve in these areas, I envision a much more successful season,” she added.

Bloomer

The Vikings dropped the first set 25-21, won the second 25-14, lost the third 25-21, came back again to win the fourth 25-12 but couldn’t pull out the final set, losing 15-9. Buchanan was again the team leader in kills with 17, adding five ace serves and 19 assists. Olson collected eight kills with two block kills, Shipman and Rudi both finished with six kill shots, Tuschl picked up 12 digs and Dachel (a few hours after winning a cross country meet in Bruce) led the team in assists with 21.