October 18, 2017 at 1:09 p.m.
Hodag spikers swept by Pines in playoff opener
Hodag spikers swept by Pines in playoff opener
Rhinelander was unable to recover from a sluggish start and was swept in three sets by Northland Pines in a Division 2 regional quarterfinal matchup.
Tuesday's match was a far cry from the previous three meetings between the two teams. Rhinelander won the first match in five sets Sept. 19 in Rhinelander. Pines returned the favor, taking a five-setter Oct. 7 in Eagle River. The teams met again last Saturday during a non-conference invite at Wausau West, which the Eagles took with a pair of 25-23 set wins.
Pines won the first set 25-12 Tuesday night and never looked back. The Eagles took the second 25-19 and the third 25-18.
The result closed Rhinelander's season with a 15-19-3 record and left the Hodags asking a simple question: What went wrong?
"We just got beat by a better team - more athletic, more aggressive, served well," Hodag coach Kathy Wawrzynowicz said. "We did not pass well and that's what happened."
Not much went right offensively for the Hodags, who finished with a minus-.052 attacking percentage - meaning that the team finished with more attacking errors (27) than kills (22) on the evening.
Hope Wissbroecker had 13 of those kills for Rhinelander, but even she was not immune to the struggles. She committed eight attacking errors in 44 attempts, for an attacking percentage of only .114. She led the GNC this season with a .371 attacking percentage.
"I think she got frustrated too because she wanted to win so badly," Wawrzynowicz said. "We didn't have a whole lot, I don't want to say we didn't have good sets to her, but some of them weren't high enough. She hit the net more than anything tonight. I don't think they blocked her a whole lot. She hit the net a lot.
"We just didn't pass well. We were out of system a lot. When you're out of system a lot, you're not going to get the set ups and some of the things that we worked on."
Four early kills by Northland Pines' Jacqueline Smith set the tone as the Eagles took a 5-2 lead into the opening set. The Hodags never recovered from the opening salvo, falling behind 8-4 before Wawrzynowicz spent the team's first timeout. Smith got a kill that put Pines up 17-9 after Wissbroecker was denied on a diving dig by Cameron Ramesh earlier in the point. The 25-12 victory for Pines was the most lopsided of the 15 sets the two teams played this year.
The Hodags never led in the second. A Cami Buchmann ace got the Hodags to 17-14, but Smith answered with back-to-back kills and Pines eventually built up a 24-15 lead before letting a couple of game points slip away.
Wissbroecker tried to get the Hodags back in it with a block kill of Smith in the third that cut the Eagles' lead to 15-13. She followed with two more kills to tie the set, but a passing error by Makayla Kuester on the next point sparked a 6-0 Pines run that put the set, and the match out of reach.
"You have to give Pines credit," Wawrzynowicz said. "They hustled and they're scrappy and they picked up everything. We didn't. We stood and watched a lot tonight."
It was a disappointing ending for a team that finished fifth in the Great Northern Conference and boasted a large senior class of 12 players, nine of whom were on Tuesday night's roster.
"I told them they did better than I expected them coming into the season," Wawrzynowicz said. "We got some good wins this year. We played with a lot of (teams). I couldn't ask for anything more. It was a good group. I never had any issues or anything like that. I told them to hold their heads high. I know that doesn't help right now, but it will."
Northland Pines advances to face top-seeded Merrill Thursday.
Jeremy Mayo may be reached at [email protected].
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