Wednesday, November 18, 2009
Volleyball: Jessee racks up kills to lead Bath past Battle
Katie Rice doles out 62 assists -- many of them to Hillary Jessee -- to pace the Chargers.
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HOT SPRINGS -- There's always an adjustment period whenever something new comes around.
New homes, cars and towns all need adjusting to.
The same thing occurs in sports, when teams that have never played each other get on the court for the first time, too.
And after an initial adjustment period, host Bath County got by John Battle 21-25, 25-21, 25-16, 25-19 in the Group A quarterfinals on Tuesday.
The first game was extremely tight, as the Chargers (24-1) tried to hold off hard-hitting Kelsey Griffitts of the Trojans.
About midway through the second game, the Chargers figured out how.
"When you never play a team in your high school career, you don't know what to expect and you just have to work around it," Bath County's Casey Trimble said. "You have to play them at first, and then figure it out and then go."
And that's precisely what the Chargers did.
They contested kill attempts and dug out what got through and by the third game, were able to get some decent leads over the Trojans (20-5).
Trimble did her part with 20 kills.
Hillary Jessee amassed 30 kills in the match for Bath County, including getting No. 1,000 of her career in the first game. Katie Rice dished out 62 assists.
"We made blocking adjustments for [Griffitts'] left-handed hit and ... we actually have a different defense now for that," Jessee said. "And so we just made blocking adjustments and we just figure out what's coming next and we make adjustments for it."
Jessee and Trimble proved to be too much for John Battle, keeping the Trojans on defense and off balance.
"We got down on ourselves and we forgot about passing," Battle coach Gary Griffitts said. "We kept moving the ball away from the setter. ... We got out of what we do, and I've always told them the first thing starts with a pass. If you can't pass the ball, you can't set it, you can't hit.
"They've got an excellent team. They've got talent at several positions."
Kelsey Griffitts finished with 20 kills for John Battle while Brittni Altman had 27 assists and Ashley Bryant had 13 digs.
Bath County coach David McGee said that the gameplan was to neutralize the Trojans' hitting by serving to keep the ball away from Griffitts.
That may have explained the difficulty that John Battle had.
And that was an adjustment.
Now the Chargers will have to adjust to playing in Richmond because they are headed there for a Group A semifinal match on Friday.
Jessee knows how she feels about that.
"It's unexplainable, absolutely unexplainable," she said.
