Chesterton suffers first boys volleyball loss of the season, 3-0, to Lake Central, growing closer each set, and has a home game today vs. Crown Point

Tom Keegan
Onwardtrojans.com

Swept but far from dominated, Chesterton suffered its first boys volleyball loss Wednesday night at home to Lake Central by scores of 25-17, 25-22, 25-23.
“As a team, we’ve got to come out of the gate swinging,” senior middle blocker Carson Chaffee said after the match. “I don’t know what it was, but there was something weird about today. We just didn’t come in as confident as we should have.”
Classmate Keith Ward, a setter, had a similar take.
“We could have come out harder,” Ward said. “We could have come out smarter. We could have come out with more energy.”
Sabotaged by excessive service errors, especially early, the Trojans were far more competitive in the final two sets, when several players lit up the crowd with athletic plays.
Peyton Dilbeck delivered the play of the night when he laid out to dig a ball and extend a possession that ended with Chesterton taking a 16-13 lead in the third set. LC rattled off the next six points to go up 19-16, but the Trojans weren’t done fighting. Ward skillfully dumped one over the net to an open spot, his second such play of the set, and Zane Westerlund, a human jet pack, soared for two consecutive kills and the match was even at 22-22. LC scored three of the next four points to seal the sweep.
Chesterton showed similar resilience in the second set with three consecutive points to tie it 16-16, the biggest plays during that stretching coming from Westerlund, who aced a serve, a big block from Chaffee and a tough dig from Ward.
Lake Central went up 22-17 and the Trojans had one more big run in them. Chaffee’s block kill cut the LC lead to 22-20 and Westerlund’s kill cut it to 23-21.
On a night in which Chaffee and Ward repeatedly delivered crowd-pleasing plays that showed how far they have progressed from a year ago, both seniors talked instead about where they need to improve.
“There was a stretch there where I needed to be better,” Ward said. “I can’t make that many mistakes in a row and that’s kind of what cost us our third set, but I’ll get better. I think we’re going to work on blocking because we were kind of late to the blocks. Other than that, I think our defense played really well.”
Chaffee talked about how he needs to improve his blocking.
“When I go up to block, I’m way too far away from the net right now, so I’m actually blocking the ball, but it goes straight down on our side of the net, instead of when I’m closer and it’s going straight down on their side. That’s the biggest thing I’m doing right now.”
For now, the Trojans’ attention is trained on tonight’s visiting opponent, Crown Point, but the players are looking forward to trying to even the score with LC on the road, April 20.
“Next time we’ll come out with full confidence,” Chaffee said. “We’re going to come right out of the gate hot. I don’t know why we were nervous today. We’re just as good a team as they are.”
As for the slow start, Ward said, “It might have been the nerves or something. If we don’t have those serves that we made errors on, it’s a completely different game out there.”
In addition to the serving errors, Coach Cathy Dilbeck said the team’s serving “has to get so much more aggressive. It’s almost too easy and then they’re shoving it right back down our throat. So we’ll focus on that (against Crown Point).”
The coach summed up where the Trojans (5-1) fell short Wednesday: “Lake Central brings the heat offensively and they’re a fast offensive team and our middles need to do a little bit better job reading the setter, getting up with their middles. But I thought we were hanging, we just needed to put a few more balls away, get a little tougher serving and get more serve consistency for sure.”