It wasn’t too long ago Kalama-Castle Rock offered the premiere volleyball matches of the season in the Southwest 1A Trico Division.
These days, however, the Chinooks are in a league of their own.
Consider Thursday night’s 25-11, 25-8, 25-23 victory over the visiting Rockets the latest testament to a team that has yet to drop a set in eight Trico matches this season.
“Every team brings something,” Kalama coach Jeni O’Neil said. “On any day the best team can lose to the worst team, or vice versa, so I just try to focus on my team playing at the same caliber no matter who we’re playing.”
Right now, that caliber is simply too much for the rest of the league to handle.
It started with thunderous Kaelyn Shipley kill on the first point of the match Thursday night and ended with another on the last.
In between Kalama (8-0 in league, 11-1 overall) put together a two-set blitzkrieg that left the Rockets (5-3, 6-4) shell shocked.
The Chinooks fired off eight aces in the first set alone — four from Averi Dyer, and three from McKenna LaRoy — then opened the second set with a 15-0 run on Haleigh Black’s serve that featured five Dyer kills.
“Our practice has been up a notch,” said Dyer, who finished with eight kills and five aces on 17-of-20 serving. “(Coach O’Neil)’s really hammering down. Everything we do just went up a level by 10.”
Setters Olivia Conradi (19 assists) and Caitlin Niemi (seven assists) allowed the Chinooks to attack CR from all angles.
Dyer, LaRoy (seven kills) and Haley Bannister (eight kills) hammered away from the outside, and Shipley punished the Rockets with five kills and three stuff blocks in the middle.
“The first two games were legit — how we play, how we practice,” O’Neil said. “I run a pretty tight ship. We go hard for two-and-a-half, three hours every single day and I create scenarios (for competition).
“The best thing about this team is I can put six on six and it’s super competitive because every player I have right now is pretty good. Scrimmaging against each other is where I get my most competition.”
Castle Rock was certainly no match with its top two liberos out of the lineup — Maddie Lorber with a torn ACL and Sarah Gaze with chicken pox — at least until they were able to shake off the cobwebs in the third game.
Auna Dolan (six kills) and Brooke Hoffman (five kills) both came alive to give setter Nicole Seidl (nine assists and five kills) support, and Allie Soyers fired off three straight aces to draw to tie the set at 18-all.
The Rockets took brief leads at 19-18 after a Kalama attack error and 20-19 following one of Seidl’s crafty dump kills. They tied things one last time at 23-all, but LaRoy tipped a ball into an open space to put Kalama ahead for good, and Shipley closed it out with one final swing off an errant CR pass.
“I’m a little disappointed in the way that we just walked into the gym,” CR coach Jeana Bayes said. “That’s typically how we play in the third game, but we weren’t even prepared to show up tonight. Mentally we weren’t there.”
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