The Mendon volleyball team kept its foot on the gas Wednesday night and ran down its third straight St. Joseph Valley League victory to start the conference schedule. The Hornets took a three-game match 25-10, 25-19, 25-12 at Centreville to improve to 17-5-2.
Jordan Van Oss finished with a pair of aces, five digs, seven kills and a block, Loryn Baughman dished out 36 assists and Brooke Howard added nine digs and 13 kills. Alexis Russell recorded five digs and 14 kills and Megan Leighton contributed four kills.
“This Saturday we go to the Harper Creek tournament and I think it will be really good to see how we fare there because I feel like we do have some momentum,” Mendon coach Kathy Trenary said. “Playing some teams outside of the league will be good.”
Six serving errors didn’t help the Bulldogs’ cause, though they still served at an 85.37-percent clip. Bailee May, Charity Yeager and Jenna Beeker each had six digs, May, Mattie Kirby and Madison Eazsol had two kills and Madison Hunter finished with five assists.
“We played tough tonight against a great ball club,” Centreville coach Melissa Gales said. “We did well serving and our reception improved as the night went on. The girls are working hard to become a dynamic hitting team and tonight was another small step in that direction.”
The Hornets are working towards a seat at the elite table in Class C. The school was bumped up a class this year after a run to the Class D semifinals in 2012, and will run into some familiar faces.
“The interesting thing about C is both us and Beal City moved up to C,” Trenary said. “Beal city is who we lost to in the semifinals last year. Monroe St. Mary is the team that won C last year and they got moved up to B. Now there’s this kind of overload of teams in C with us and Beal City, then you’ve got St. Louis and Unionville Sebawaing and Morley Stanwood. Monroe St. Mary is gone, so everybody wants to be that No. 1 team. It makes it interesting; it makes it fun. There are a lot of good teams out there. Schoolcraft’s really good, too. It’s kind of a loaded C Division, which is kind of neat.”