A night after winning the county title, Crawfordsville volleyball was back at home for another Sagamore Conference showdown with one of the premier teams in the SAC in the Tri-West Bruins. The Bruins have always been a thorn in the Athenians side and Wednesday proved to be no different as Tri-West walked into the Athenian gym and came out with three set sweep (25-15, 25-17, 25-18) over CHS.
Tri-West was able to control the pace and tempo for the first two sets, but after being down 2-0, Cville came out and led 8-4 after the first 12 points. The Bruins snuffed out the CHS rally attempt by scoring the next five to take the lead and never looked back. Down 22-15 the Athenians put together a small three point rally to make it 22-18 before Tri-West scored the final three points to take the match.
“Tri-West is a very athletic team that has some real good players over there,” Crawfordsville coach Kelly Johnson said. “That doesn’t mean that we back down or stop playing aggressive. We’ll learn from the experience as we always do because we didn’t necessarily play our style of volleyball tonight, but once we did start to challenge them a little bit I thought we were able to play competitively with them.”
Macy Bruton led the way for CHS in the loss with 13 kills, 10 digs, and three aces. The standout senior is just 13 digs away from reaching the prestigious 1,000 mark for her career. Elyse Widmer had eight digs and two aces with Samantha Rohr adding six digs of her own and two aces. Halle Elliot notched 13 digs with Jessica Tribble tallying 16 assists and a pair of digs. Hallie Gayler rounded out the stat sheet for CHS with three kills and three blocks.
The Bruins are a potential sectional foe the Athenians and Johnson noted how her squad seemed to playing to however the Bruins wanted, and that involved keeping the ball away from Bruton who still leads the state in kills.
“Their goal was to obviously keep it away from Macy because they know how dangerous she is,” Johnson said. “Tri-West is a scrappy team and worked hard all night long. We have to know that when we play a good team like that we have to be the ones who put the pressure on and I don’t think we did that well in the first two games.”
CHS falls to 15-6 (2-2 SAC) with the loss while the Bruins improve to 14-5 (6-0 SAC) and will likely battle Western Boone for the conference title.
Tri-West will return to Lizton on Thursday for a very difficult matchup against Brebeuf while the Athenians get to stay at home Thursday as they welcome the Fountain Central Mustangs.
“We just have to come back and be ready to go tomorrow,” Johnson said. “The girls know that. It’s another busy week for us as we’ll play in Clinton Central’s tournament on Saturday against them, Logansport, and Heritage Christian. We’re hoping we can come back with that tournament trophy to cap our week off.”
