Vastly improved Trojans boys volleyball team takes undefeated record into Monday’s home match vs. Valparaiso

Tom Keegan
Onwardtrojans.com

The upside for Porter County Conference boys volleyball teams is that most of the schools have taken the sport, when it had club status, seriously for years.
The downside: It was a fall sport then, and as an IHSAA sport it takes place in the fall. Several athletes already had established themselves as key members of a spring sports team and remained loyal to that team. That explains why Hebron doesn’t have a JV squad and has just six players on the roster, which means all six play the entire match. The Hawks (0-2) also lost nine seniors from last season’s team.
Hebron hung pretty tough in its first two sets of a 3-0 loss at Chesterton on Thursday night but succumbed to exhaustion in the third. The Trojans executed a sweep by scores of 25-15, 25-17, 25-9.
By contrast to the situation for many PCC schools, Chesterton is putting a far more entertaining, efficient team on the floor than a year ago and takes a 4-0 record into Monday’s contest against visiting Valparaiso.
“I think we’re good,” senior middle blocker Bryton Oliver said. “I think we’re the team to beat this year in the DAC. I think we’re really well-rounded. I don’t think we have a weakness anywhere.”
Oliver said that he expects that the biggest challenges to winning the DAC will come from Crown Point, Lake Central and Valparaiso.
Oliver and senior Robert Williams form a strong wall as middle blockers, high-flying senior outside hitter Jack Rodriguez does a little bit of everything, outside hitters George O’Connor, a senior, and sophomore Zane Westerlund and senior right-side hitter Ryan Tucker are playing well, sophomore Nate Mihut and freshman Declan Ringler handle setting duties, and back-row juniors Adam LeNeave and Cesar Mendoza “both are really good passers,” Oliver said. “Jack can also pass. I think our passing is really good this year.”
Oliver has taken a huge leap from last year and that’s to be expected since he missed all but the end of the season recovering from a broken tibia (shin bone) suffered in club volleyball. He has a metal rod running down his shin that he said he does not in any way notice is there. And no, it does not set off metal detectors at the airport.
“We were really worried about his timing because being off so long his timing wasn’t there, and you’ve seen a big difference from the end of last year to this year,” Labaj said. “He was able to work all winter and get that timing back, and being able to work with the setters non-stop is huge. So that timing is really getting there, and I feel like the rust is off.”
Olver said he didn’t feel like he fully regained his timing until “recently. It took a lot more time than I thought it would to get the rust off. Just working at it over and over in practice and a lot of the repetition since the season started, I think I’ve gotten it back.”
The benefit of not taking a sport seriously until at an older age, as has been the case with most Chesterton players, is that improvement comes rapidly.
“It had a lot to do with a lot of us playing club,” Oliver said. “We’ve been playing year-round for the past two years, a lot of us. It’s been fun.”
Now that the team is stocked with players who have experience, Labaj is able to speed up the pace of his teaching.
“Practice is going well. We’re starting to learn new things,” the coach said. “We ran a couple of new plays today. We’re getting better as a group and starting to work a lot better together. We’re still working on getting the execution down to a fine T, but other than that, I think everything is going really wel