By Ryan Mink
rmink@digitalsports.com
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It was made abundantly clear that senior outside hitter Becky West wanted to be the one finish the match against Magruder. With the final point hanging in the air, West pointed up, as if to motion to best friend and setter Brighid Casey to give her an assist.
Casey fed her and West, of course, crushed the ****, giving Good Counsel a 3-0 win over the rival Colonels Thursday night in Rockville – 25-16, 25-21, 25-17.
“Last year they took a game from us and we didn’t want them to take any games from us,” West said. “We wanted to win it in three.”
These are the kind of goals Good Counsel has this season. They don’t want to just win. The Falcons want to dominate.
Although the game doesn’t have playoff implications since Good Counsel is in the WCAC and Magruder is a Montgomery County public school, it is one of the most intense regular season matches of the year. This season, as is often the case, both teams entered with an undefeated record.
“This means so much to us,” West said. “Coming from a private school sometimes you don’t get recognized for being a good team, but being able to beat an undefeated public school shows we’re the best in Montgomery County and it feels great.”
The Falcons (21-0) scored 10 of the final 12 points in the first game, 11 of the final 14 in the second game and four in a row to close out the match.
West (19 kills) and Casey (33 assists and 7 aces) led the way for the Falcons, but as Coach Karen Kart said, the difference this year is she has more production from her bench this season than in the past. For example, sophomore Meagan Donohoe, had a handful of huge blocks near the end of the first game and start of the second.
“They’re loaded, I think,” Magruder Coach Scott Zanni said. “I’ve been doing high school for 15 years and they’ve got to be one of the top two or three teams I’ve seen during that time.”
“They’ve got a great setter,” he continued. “Becky West is as good an outside hitter as we’ve seen come out of this area in a long time. Their other outside hitter Jenna Campbell is real good, their libero is solid, they’ve got two big kids in the middle, their opposites are really big and athletic. They don’t have a weakness. They’re loaded.”
Good Counsel’s players, however, say this wasn’t even their best volleyball. The Falcons claim they were at their best earlier this season at the Garden State Challenge in New Jersey when the finished first amongst a pool of nationally-ranked teams.
The Falcons are ranked No. 86 nationally by Prepvolleyball.com and for contrast, a team ranked No. 19 finished third at the Garden State Challenge, Casey said.
Magruder (18-1) had its best shot at a win in the second game as the Colonels took an 18-14 lead. But Casey rattled off two straight aces to start a six-point Good Counsel stretch.
“I think everybody else gets freaked out,” Casey said. “And I was going back to serve and I just knew I had to calm down and get some aces. … We just pretty much wanted to come here, win and shut them down.”
– statistician John Hoven contributed to this report
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