Hodag volleyball closes regular season with win

CRANDON — Mired in a five-match losing streak against Great Northern Conference foes, Rhinelander High School volleyball coach Jayme Wyss said she knew exactly what her team needed prior to WIAA tournament play. 

“You just need a win sometimes,” she said.

It was not necessarily easy, but the Hodags got exactly that on Thursday as they swept the Crandon Cardinals on the road 26-24, 25-22, 25-22 in non-conference play.

The victory moved Rhinelander to 12-26 as it closed out the regular season. The Hodags are the No. 10 seed in their 12-team WIAA Division 2 regional and will begin tournament play tonight at seventh-seeded Merrill. 

Wyss said the key for her team on Thursday was simply being more intentional on the attack and cutting down on the errors. That seemed to show throughout the match as the Hodags hit .122 against the Cardinals with 18 errors, opposed to .035 with 22 errors two nights earlier in a four-set loss to Tomahawk. 

“We’re trying to make these girls more intentional … We need to be smarter in the situations where something is off. That’s what we’re trying to really go for,” she said. “The first set was cleaner. The second and third set we had more errors, but it was like, ‘OK, what do you do in that situation when it’s off, or you’re blind to the net?’ You need to be able to do something safe.”

The set scores belied how in control Rhinelander was most of the night. Crandon held three one-point leads in the match, but made late rallies in each of the three sets to make the Hodags sweat out their victories. 

“It’s fun to come in, there was a little bit of pressure at the end, but we had a big enough lead where it’s like, ‘OK girls, you can finish this,’” Wyss said. “We definitely had to work still. It wasn’t like we were just coming in here and walking. We just had enough variety.”

The first set was the most tense of the group, as the Hodags squandered leads of 15-9 and 23-19 to see the Cardinals get to game point first, up 24-23. A net call on the Cardinals gave the Hodags a needed side out and forced extra points. Rhinelander took over from there with a block kill by Macey Schmoeger followed by a put away from Libbey Buchmann to give the Hodags a 1-0 lead in the match. 

Neither team scored more than two points consecutively in the second set until Buchmann hit back-to-back aces as part of a 3-0 run that put the Hodags ahead 20-13. From there, Crandon ripped off three in a row to get to within 20-16 and later had a 6-1 run to get within 24-22, but a service error by Crandon’s Alayna McCorkle let the Hodags off the hook. 

Rhinelander led 20-11 in the third before the Cardinals went on a 10-2 run to get within a point. Kelsi Beran closed with two of her match-high 14 kills over the final four points to secure the match for Rhinelander. 

“Kelsi was just on fire,” Wyss said. “A lot of her hitting errors were later on after she had already done a lot. She had nine hitting errors, but she had 14 kills. We’re making progress. That was some of her best (swings), in rhythm with the sets, just hammering the ball.”

Rhinelander spread the ball around on Thursday as it finished the night with 32 kills. Buchmann added seven kills, Callie Horechler had four and six different players recorded at least two kills.

Lucy Lindner had 18 assists and five service aces on the night. Buchmann added 14 digs and four aces. Libero Tori Stella led the way with 22 digs while Cassidy Lindner had 11. Schmoeger was created with two block kills on the night. 

Rhinelander travels to Merrill to night to take on a Bluejay team that went 13-19 on the year and 5-7 in the Wisconsin Valley Conference. Merrill split with the two GNC teams it faced during the regular season. It swept Tomahawk and was swept by Mosinee — who will host the winner of tonight’s matchup on Thursday.

“From what I’ve been told about them is they’re nothing special with hitters, but they, pick up everything and good defense will do a lot … It depends on what their block looks like if we’ll be able to find the floor as easy,” Wyss said.

The Hodags will begin the WIAA playoffs one day before to the 10th anniversary of their last tournament victory — a five-set triumph over Mosinee Oct. 23, 2014 that was part of a run to the regional finals that year.  

Jeremy Mayo may be reached at [email protected].