Chesterton volleyball defeats visiting LaPorte, 3-1, to improve to 20-3 with an uneven performance that at times exposed the downfalls of the Trojans’ predictable two-pronged attack

Tom Keegan
Onwardtrojans.com

Nobody involved was doing backflips after Chesterton completed its season sweep of visiting LaPorte with a 3-1 victory Thursday night.
The win came by scores of 25-14, 25-22, 21-25, 25-16 in a match prolonged by a lengthy discussion over a disputed point in the third set. Chesterton won that ruling and the lost the set on the next point.
“I take it as a loss,” senior leader Tenley Davis said. “When we were arguing at the end there I was like, ‘Just give them the point because we should have never been in that situation.’”
Said junior middle blocker Maddie Gilliam: “I’m not happy with beating that team 3-1. We should have won 3-0.”
So why didn’t the Trojans have a more dominant night.
“We get bored. If it’s not LC, Crown Point or a big team that we know is very good, we have a hard time getting our own momentum,” Davis said. “I always want to play and a lot of us want to play all the time, but we all have to realize that these are the ones we need to show who we are so that it comes naturally when we play the big teams.”
Gilliam added that the Trojans tend to come out on fire in the first set and then fall off. She also said the team didn’t communicate enough, which allowed balls to hit the floor.
Chesterton’s best stretch of volleyball all season came after the Trojans fell behind at Lake Central, losing the first two sets, and came back to win. Chesterton played its least predictable volleyball of the season that night and instead of going back to outside hitters extraordinaire Davis and Luca Bombacino over and over, Abby Parrish and Gilliam were set more than usual, and they responded with big nights.
It worked so well that it seemed as if though would become the team’s new way of going about things, but old habits can be difficult to break.
“I was telling everyone tonight that we really have to work on spreading out the ball because as we get further into the season and the postseason teams are just going to key on me and Luca,” Davis said. “We have Maddie in the middle and the more we get the ball all the way across, we’ll be unstoppable. We’ll be unstoppable. And Maddie has hangtime. She gets so high.”
Gilliam was the third Chesterton player to commit to play volleyball on a full ride at a Division I school, following Davis (Loyola of Chicago) and Bombacino (Michigan).
When a player as accomplished as Davis talks about how Gilliam can turn her into a spectator at times, it says something about how ready Gilliam is to take on a bigger load in the Trojans’ attack.
“She balls out,” Davis said of Gilliam. “I love watching her. She comes up to me and will be like ‘What can I do differently?’ I’m like ‘Nothing.’ It’s so frustrating. We get such good passes, and we don’t set her enough. We’ve got to set her more. It is so frustrating because she’s so good and every team knows we’re going to go to the outside because that’s all we do.”
Davis, Chesterton’s career leader in kills, set the single season record in that category last season with 485. She leads the team this year with 261 kills and has an unusually high hitting percentage of .356. Bombacino is next with 259 kills and is hitting at a .264 rate. Gilliam is third on the team with 88 kills and a .255 hitting percentage. Parrish (51/.244) is next.
It's not often a player lobbies against padding her statistics, which essentially is what Davis is doing, but she wants the team’s attack to become less predictable and believes in the Trojans’ chances of making it all the way if Gilliam becomes featured more as an attacker.
The Trojans improved to 20-3 overall and 7-1 in the DAC with the home wins over Merrillville and LaPorte in a three-day stretch and head into a pivotal three-game stretch of the DAC portion of the schedule.
Lake Central visits Tuesday, Sep. 23, followed by Valparaiso on the road, Thursday, Sep. 25, and a home match against Crown Point on Tuesday, Sep. 30.