The Dos Pueblos and San Marcos girls volleyball teams are at different stages in their seasons. That was evident when the Goleta Valley rivals faced each other for the first time this season Tuesday night.
The Chargers had too much experience, size and firepower and overwhelmed the visiting Royals 25-10, 25-13, 25-8 in a Channel League match at Sovine Gym.
“It’s a steady climb,” San Marcos co-coach Courtney Preston said of her team’s progress. “They keep improving every day. It’s just working on serving and passing, attitude and mental toughness. That’s what is going to get us to the next level.”
Dos Pueblos, on the other hand, is already playing at that next level. The Chargers (11-1, 4-0) have won five in a row and are ranked 8th in the nation in the MaxPreps Xcellent 25 poll.
“I think we’re right where we want to be,” said coach Todd Garrett. “We worked on some things in practice this week that we saw executed successfully tonight. And that’s a coach’s dream right there.”
Garrett kept Stanford-bound twins Carly and Sam Wopat on the bench for this match. In their place, Karina Evans, Nicki Brown and Kelcey Chaffin helped the Charger attack stay potent. Evans led the team with 11 kills, while Brown had seven and Chaffin four.
“Karina had a great match tonight. She stepped up big,” Garrett said. “Kelcey Chaffin had one her best matches tonight, too. That’s fun to see us getting the middles going and those girls getting a lot of balls, and they were doing the right things with it.”
“They did awesome,” Sally Yingst said of her teammates. “Karina did extremely well, I thought. She was just killing the ball. Kelcey hit a couple of really good ones.
“Everybody was participating really well,” she added. “We were loud and talkative on the floor. We were all really comfortable on the court.”
The Chargers made the Royals uncomfortable with some tough serving. They reeled off 10 aces in the match.
“If we’re able to serve consistently like that with every match that we play, that would turn the game over to us a lot quicker and easier,” said DP assistant coach Greg Novak. “I think tonight we missed a total of three serves with a lot of bullets going at them. It was fun. I call the serves and they nailed and they nailed them hard.”
San Marcos (2-6, 0-2) was able to keep things close in the first set. The Royals trailed just 10-6 before Dos Pueblos found its rhythm and went on a 9-1 run to win going away.
“Their offense was pretty quick, quicker than what we’ve seen and what we’re used to seeing,” said Preston of the Chargers.
In the second set, Jaimie Mayner blocked for a point and the Royals scored on a couple of DP errors to pull within 15-10. But they served the next ball out of bounds and the Chargers scored the next six points on kills by Nicki Brown, Chaffin and Sammie Brown.
Yingst said the Chargers’ mindset in the match was to mind their own business.
“We were going to play our game and only ours,” she said. “They are just another team on the other side of the net. We just focus on us and play our game to our full extent.”
It was all DP in the third set. Back-to-back kills by Nicki Brown followed by an ace by her sister Sammie Brown gave the Chargers an 11-3 advantage.
“A lot of it is mental,” Preston said of the serve-receive breakdowns. “We can pass those balls. It’s just knowing we can do that.”
Preston said she saw some positive things from her squad. Emma Campbell had 14 digs and Mayner had three solo blocks for the Royals.
“The girls definitely hung in there and made some plays,” she said. “Jaimie Mayner had three stuff solo blocks, Emma had some great digs. We made some good plays; it’s just in the third game we couldn’t get the ball over the net.”
