Oct. 16, 2007

By Anthony Arroyo

Journal-Advocate sports reporter

Although the Northeastern Junior College Plainswomen volleyball team got a fairly decent crowd to watch them play McCook Community College (MCC) Monday night, the atmosphere still seemed to be a bit dull.

The Plainswomen were victorious, 30-15, 30-16, 30-17 and even with how lopsided the scores appeared to be, head coach Marci Henry wasn't extremely pleased with the performance.

"We played well at moments, but we want to be the team that controls the tempo and I feel that we didn't do that," Henry said shortly after the match. "I felt that we could have done a much better job with that."

NJC slowly began to pull away in Game 1, after MCC did a decent job keeping things close. The lead pushed to 16-10, then 20-13 before the home team finished the contest on a 10-2 run to take the first game pretty handily.

The second match saw three early ties, with the last one at three-all. An ugly start to the game featured a couple hitting errors, and back-to-back serving errors from each team. It wasn't until the Plainswomen were up four at 14-10 before kicking into gear. A 14-10 lead turned into 20-13 after huge kills by sophomore Thais Hollerbach and Addi Radke forced McCook to call a time out.

Another big kill by Hollerbach made the game 25-14 and a kill by freshman Elexis Eliades closed the game out with the 14-point win, heading into the locker room for the 10 minute intermission.

Out of the locker room, NJC started Game 3 with four straight points from sophomore Jessica Tjaden on serve and the team never looked back. The Plainswomen opened up a 14-4 lead early, as both team began trading a couple points from there. At 25-15, Northeastern used one final push, a 5-2 run to send the game into the books. Sophomore Brittany Palmer had four aces, followed by Radke and freshman Kristin Gardiner with two apiece.

Offensively, it was the Radke show at the net, shooting 15 kills across to lead all attackers in that category. Hollerbach added eight kills Monday night. On blocks, Radke had five stuff blocks, followed closely by sophomore Tamy Leipelt with four. Tjaden finished the contest with 29 assists, nine digs and one loss contact from her eye in the third game. Freshman Suyan Leipelt led all defenders with 13 digs, while Gardiner ended her active day at 11.

Entering Monday, NJC began a stretch of six matches in 10 days. While this span of games could mentally challenge the girls heading into the Region IX tournament, coach Henry feels that they have had tougher challenges from early tournaments.

"Six matches in one tournament are tougher mentally than six matches in 10 days," Henry said. "A long tournament hits hard physically and with that the mental part of the game goes down with it. The only thing that won't be very fun is the traveling."

The Plainswomen will indeed put some miles on the bus this week. NJC will begin traveling to Nebraska to face North Platte Community College Wednesday, Oct. 17, before driving all the way through the state of Colorado to play Trinidad Junior College the following day.