Chesterton boys volleyball suffers first loss, falls out of first place in DAC standings with loss at Lake Central

Tom Keegan
Onwardtrojans.com
The Chesterton boys volleyball team had reason to feel like the team to beat in the DAC as the team bus rolled into the parking lot at Lake Central late Tuesday afternoon.
Four sets of varsity volleyball later, the role had shifted to the Indians, 3-1 victors in convincing fashion.
LC (6-1 overall, 4-0 in the DAC) emerged from the night alone atop the conference standings. Chesterton (8-1, 4-1) suffered its first loss in this the first year of boys volleyball as a fully sanctioned IHSAA sport.
The Indians prevailed 25-23, 20-25, 25-16, 25-20.
Danny Smith (17 kills), full first name Dannis, led a pack of talented junior hitters who used power, precision and just the right dose of deception to keep the Trojans playing catch up all night.
“They were pretty good with watching where we were on the block and then changing it up and hitting different spots, and it kept us on our toes,” Chesterton senior middle blocker Bryton Oliver said. “It took us a while to catch onto it. That’s where they started to get some runs with a lot of points early.”
The schedule affords Chesterton a chance to even the score with a home match vs. LC on April 28. Looking ahead a year, knocking off Lake Central will grow even more difficult. The Indians played nine juniors, one sophomore and one senior Tuesday night.
The match opened in a way that suggested it would need five sets to settle and neither team would dominate, but it didn’t play out that way.
In the first set, Chesterton appeared to go up 21-19, but a reversed call left the score tied and the hosts finished strong.
The Trojans bounced back with a 25-20 win in the second set, and then LC came out with its most dominant stretch of the night, burying Chesterton with an avalanche of hard-hit well-placed balls the location of which seemed to catch the visitors by surprise.
LC went up 13-1, completely foreign territory for a Chesterton squad that had cruised through the DAC losing just one set, in a 3-1 win at Crown Point, before making the trip to St. John. The Trojans went on an 8-2 to come close to getting back into it before the Indians finished strong.
The hosts brought more precision and power in the fourth set, taking command with a 22-10 lead. Then, with junior Cesar Mendoza setting, Chesterton rattled off seven consecutive points. At that point, anyone in the audience who saw Florida come back three times from deficits of nine points or more to win the NCAA men’s basketball tournament had to be thinking anything’s possible.
Nope, not on this night.
“It seems like a lot of our boys are not 100% today,” Chesterton coach Kevin Labaj said. “Tired, worn down, a couple of them were sick, and just didn’t play up to their ability, and sometimes it’s hard to do.”
On a night Chesterton had to be at its best to win, the Trojans came up short.
“They’re a tough team,” Labaj said of the Indians. “They came to play today, and our boys knew that this was going to be the toughest place to win in the DAC.”
Barring anything unexpected happening in the next three weeks, LC enters the rematch at Chesterton as the favorite. If every student and every sports fan in town who does not have a conflict in their schedules on April 21 decides to circle that date and tries to show up to watch the two top teams in the DAC square off, that might turn it into a coin toss, but that’s a lot to ask of a sport in its first year with IHSAA status.
Or is it? Might the students and the town combine forces and pack the place? The Florida Gators just supplied evidence that anything is possible in sports.