Sports

Stars sweep Aggies, remain undefeated in district play

By Tyler Ohmann

10/22/2013

Bottineau closed out their district regular season schedule last Tuesday with a 3-0 sweep of Velva.

The Stars, who went on the road to beat the Aggies, finished the district regular season undefeated and easily captured the top seed for the District 11 Tournament, which begins on Oct. 31 in Towner.
In Thursday’s match, the Stars, who fell to the Aggies in last season’s District 11 Tournament title game, narrowly won the first set 28-26, but it was smooth sailing from then on.

“We need to give the Lady Aggies credit in the first game, they played fast and hard and created some hitting errors for the Stars,” stated Stars head coach Steve Dunrud. “We also missed a few serves in that first game that hurt us, those errors gave them momentum which made for an exciting finish to game one.”

Bottineau opened up big leads to start both the second and third sets enroute to 25-11 wins in both of them, which ended in a Bottineau sweep.

“In games two and three, the Stars really started to get things together both offensively and defensively. We really kept the Lady Aggies off balance with a mixture of good serves and a variety of nice hits by our hitters,” Dunrud stated. “This led to them playing out of system volleyball, which led to many great opportunities for our hitters.”

“We are very proud of our young ladies as they bounced back from a less than perfect first game to play very well in the last two games,” Dunrud added.

Leading the Stars in the win were seniors Danielle McDonald (nine kills, seven digs), Bailey Neubauer (25 assists), Rachael Fix (14 digs), Karlee McCloud (two aces, seven digs) and Courtney Gallagher (two aces). Juniors Stephanie Brenden (nine kills) and Kennedy Olson (three blocks) also performed well in the victory.

Madi Letvin led the Aggies with 12 digs and five kills in the losing effort.

Bottineau improved to 22-6 overall and a perfect 7-0 in district play with the win.

The Stars will play at Rolla on Thursday and then close out their regular season with a home match against Langdon on Monday.

The Stars will likely play 0-5 Sawyer in the first round of the District Tournament, which begins on Oct. 31 in Towner. The Flashes have their final match tonight against 4-2 Newburg-Westhope, and played last night against 2-4 Rugby. Sawyer would have to win both of those matches to get the seventh seed. In which case Bottineau would then play 1-6 Drake-Anamoose.