VERSAILLES – The Troy Lady Trojans battled back to win a five set 3-2 thriller over the Versailles Lady Tigers volleyball team in non-conference play.
“We have stuff that we need to work on together but it was a step forward today,” said Versailles coach Kenzie Bruggeman. “I want to take that and I want to run with it – but I want them to come into practice knowing that we need to push ourselves just a little bit farther so that we are starting to see W’s instead of L’s on days like today.”
The D-I Lady Trojans brought a 9-1 record into the match with their lone loss of the season coming at the hands of the Tippecanoe Lady Red Devils in a five set match.
The defending two time D-3 state champion Lady Tigers handed the visitors a 25-6 first set drubbing and moved out to a 2-0 lead with 25-20 second set victory.
Troy took an early 4-1 third set lead and extended its lead to 14-9 and 18-13 bringing timeouts from the Versailles bench.
The Lady Tigers got even at 19-19, 21-21 and 22-2 but could not grab a lead with Troy scoring 3-unansered points to win 25-22 and send the match to a fourth set.
“The longer and longer it got into the game I felt like Troy just kept getting in system and their offense just kept speeding up and then our block lagged a little bit,” Bruggeman said. “That’s just hats off to them. They ran a good offense.”
Versailles jumped out to a 7-1 fourth set advantage before Troy would get back in the match trailing 14-11 bringing a timeout from the Versailles bench.
Trailing 15-13, the Lady Trojans used a 4-point run to lead 17-15. The Lady Tigers evened the set at 17-17 and 19-19 before Troy used a 6-2 run to win set No. 4 and send the match to a deciding 15-point fifth set.
“We just have to execute on our side,” said Bruggeman. “Too many times we would have a free ball or we would have a good dig-up and then something would get messed up to where we’re just tipping or rolling-shooting the ball over to where it has got to be a kill, one and done so that we can get a momentum run.”
The Lady Trojans needed just 1-point for the win leading 14-6 before Versailles battled back with a 5-0 run to trail 14-11 before Troy would get the final point of the night to win by a 15-11 score and take the match by a 3-2 count.
“It was so fun just to see us getting better each day, each game, it’s huge,” stated Bruggeman. “We come back and we were just right there. We make errors at the end of games that keep us from getting the ‘W’ on our record
“Troy is a great team” Bruggeman concluded. “It was a fun day and we competed.”
