With high stakes comes raw emotion.
At Riverhead High School, grit and toughness flowed rampant through the veins of the Riverhead volleyball team Wednesday night as they faced off against the defending League IV champs, the Bellport Clippers. Coming in to the day, Riverhead was tied with Bellport and Hauppague for first place.
The intensity level in the gym wavered in and out as each team took turns completely dominating in stretches pushing the match to the fifth set where Riverhead lost, 25-13.
“Bellport’s an awesome team, every year they gave us great competition,” head coach Amy Greene said. “But I think this year, we were the competition.”
Bellport’s assistant head coach Cassandra Watson couldn’t agree any more with that statement. In her six years coaching Bellport’s varsity team, and during her tenure as a player, Riverhead was never competition, let alone a threat. But this year’s a little different.
“This is the best Riverhead team I have ever seen,” she said.
After losing the first set, a different, more physical and strategic Riverhead squad showed up behind the leadership of Hali Martens (6 kills, 10 digs) who had no choice but to come up big with Dezarae Brown, the team’s middle hitter, sidelined with an injury. She was a complete force around the net, blocking and killing many opportunities.
Bellport (5-1 League IV, 9-2 overall) fought back after falling behind in an early hole and tied it at 7 before Riverhead went on a blocking rampage, refusing to go down, battling and chasing every last ball. The Blue Waves, behind their defense, took the second set 25-18.
Riverhead (4-2 League IV, 7-2 overall) failed to shift their momentum to the following set, finding themselves down 16-8 midway through the set. But with smarts and hustle, the Blue Waves contested and gave Bellport its best spike. On one occasion, Danielle Thomas ran way off the court, saving the ball by blindly hitting it back over her head for a Riverhead point.
With Sara Tucci serving, Riverhead kept crawling back: 10-17, 13-17, 15-17. When the score became 21-17, Coach Greene took a timeout sensing a time of momentum and an opportunity to steal a second set.
“Volleyball is all about momentum,” Greene said. “It’s just about an all-mental game.”
But Bellport came out swinging; they pushed the score all the way to 24-20 when Riverhead received a jolt of their own.
Joscelin Morrow proved heroic at times (41 digs), spelling the Riverhead defense of Bellport’s toughest hitters. And with Martens playing what could have been one of her strongest performances ever, she provided the kill on Riverhead’s 24th point, tying the game at 24.
But that’s as far as the Blue Waves got, losing the set 26-24.
Morrow almost singlehandedly won the fourth set, using a skill set not really talked about much, being the libero: serving. She recorded 6 aces in the set forcing the fifth set without much retaliation, 25-11.
“You can tell that Bellport mentally checked out of the game that fourth set,” Greene said.
Unfortunately, the fifth set was all Bellport.
“I think our nerves got to us a little bit [in the fifth set],” Greene said. “But it’s something that we can work on and build upon and I look forward to seeing Bellport again.”
Riverhead faces Hauppague at home next Tuesday.
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