NEW PALESTINE — On Wednesday night, in what has been a perfect start to the volleyball season, New Palestine may have had its most impressive performance yet.
The Dragons entered the night 8-0, were coming off a championship at the Southport Invitational over the weekend, and had lost only two sets all season.
What they did on Wednesday, in front of their home crowd, put an exclamation point on how impressive their start to the season has been.
The Dragons (9-0) swept Hamilton Heights (9-2) 25-14, 25-15 and 25-19 to remain unbeaten. The Huskies entered the match with a lone loss to Western Boone and had beaten New Palestine’s Hancock County and Hoosier Heritage Conference rival Mt. Vernon on Saturday.
“That was a very convincing win for us,” New Palestine head coach Kelli Gabehart said. “I told the girls yesterday at practice that this was going to be our toughest match so far this season, and we came out and executed our gameplan.”
The gameplan according to Gabehart was to keep the ball away from the Huskies libero and Western Kentucky University commit, Kennedy Cherry.
Hitters Natalie Sevier, Hayden Ramsey and Josie Corbett did just that.
And the game plan worked to perfection.
Sevier had a season-best 17 kills, Ramsey had 13 and Corbett had eight.
“Their libero is a Division-I recruit, so we tried to keep it away from her,” Gabehart said. “We did a really good job of that.”
Sevier, who came into the night averaging 2.5 kills per set, beat that number in all three sets. In Set 1 she had five, in Set 2 she had four and in Set 3 she had eight.
“Natalie in the back row was a huge weapon,” Gabehart said. “She was hitting them down the line and going right at their blockers. Just very impressive.”
In the opening set, it was Sevier’s serve that kickstarted the Dragons run to pull away.
Down 6-5, she took serve and had back-to-back aces to put New Palestine ahead for the first time all night.
From there, the Dragons outscored the Huskies 18-8 the rest of the way.
With the score 12-10, they reeled off eight straight points including two Ramsey aces, a Sevier kill and a Caylee Brown block.
Three of the final five points came on Sevier kills before a Corbett kill closed out the Set 1 win.
Set 2 was much of the same for the New Palestine attack, except this time they led early on.
A Corbett kill made it 2-1 in favor of the Dragons and they never looked back.
Sevier kills at eight, nine and 10 points pushed the lead to 10-5, and later in the set, three straight Ramsey points increased the lead to 20-11.
Another Ramsey kill down the stretch and a few attacking errors on the Huskies put the Dragons ahead 2-0.
After dominating the majority of the first two sets, the Dragons had to battle from behind much of the third.
Hamilton Heights jumped out to an 8-3 lead and later grew the advantage to 12-4 on a pair of kills by Macie Smith before a timeout by Gabehart helped flip the script.
“The timeout allowed us to fire them up a bit. Last year, we were down two sets and came back and did the reverse sweep at their place. We were not about to let that happen here at home,” Gabehart said. “We just had to kick it into gear a bit.”
Following the break, the Dragons scored 13 of the next 18 points to tie it at 17-17.
A Corbett ace tied it and a rotation error on the Huskies on her next serve gave the Dragons the lead.
Two timeouts by Hamilton Heights head coach Steve Ward over the final seven points did little to stop the Dragons attack and kills by Sevier and Ramsey ended the match.
“It’s really high,” Gabehart said of her team’s confidence. “We’re putting in the work because we want to be really good at the end of the season. When we get into conference play and our sectional, things get really tough.”
Samantha Gooding led New Palestine with 33 assists.
The Dragons are back in action Thursday at 6:30 p.m. at Whiteland.
