Scott City sweeps Zalma

After the Zalma Bulldogs erased three of the four match points the Scott City volleyball team had earned Monday night, Rams' coach Haley Jennings called a timeout and gave all-state junior Mikah Simpson an order.

"It's a little bit nerve-racking when you know that it's a tight game and coach calls a timeout and she looks at you and she says, 'Put it away,' and everybody looks at you and says, 'Yeah, you better put it away,'" Simpson said.

"My heart dropped and I was like, 'Oh my God, this ball's coming to me. Where am I going to put it? Who do I need to hit it to?' I was getting a little bit nervous."

Simpson's initial attack was dug on the next point but she stuffed a Bulldog attack from her middle blocker position to give her team a 25-21, 25-23 on senior night at Zalma.

"That's the best way to end a game -- with a stuff," Simpson said. "That is the perfect ending of a game, and especially a game so close like this one. It felt great."

Simpson, who finished with 10 kills and 13 digs, plays opposite of Katie Hogan in the Rams' rotation, meaning Scott City has the luxury of having an all-state player at the net throughout every match.

Hogan, a first-team all-state selection as a sophmore last season, had 13 kills and 13 digs to go along with two kill-blocks.

"You can pretty much count on her every time, but when she's on, she's on," Jennings said of Hogan, who rarely missed Monday night. "You've got to feed her the ball.

"Mikah was on tonight. Mikah played a great game. I can't say enough. ... We knew, you feed the ball to Mikah, she's going to do the same thing. We're pretty fortunate in that aspect to have two dependable hitters all the time."

The teams exchanged good starts to the games as Zalma jumped out to a 8-3 lead in Game 1 while Scott City led 9-3 early in Game 2.

While both games were close late, both teams were plagued by inconsistent execution.

"We'd play good. We'd play bad. We'd play up. We'd play down," Jennings said. "And it was the same way with them. They'd play up. They'd play down. It was kind of back-and-forth, back-and-forth. We knew coming in it was going to be a big game, especially since they beat us a set at the SEMO tournament, and then with senior night and all that."

Zalma was led by senior Lesta Newberry, who had eight kills, four blocks and the unenviable task of trying to block Hogan and Simpson in the middle, often by herself.

"I think we played really well," Newberry said. "I'm not really disappointed because it was a good game and we played really well, and that's all I could ask for."

Freshman Emily Merick had five aces to go along with five kills.

"I have to give credit to [Scott City] because we'd go up and we would hit, and any time that we were blocked and we got it put back at us then we would tend to be a little bit more scared to go in and hit," Zalma coach Dwight Ford said.

Zalma, ranked No. 5 in Class 1, will take part in the Mississippi Valley Conference tournament, which begins Wednesday, where it could face two other teams -- Leopold and Meadow Heights -- that have spent time in the Class 1 rankings this season.

"I told the girls after the game, 'Am I disappointed that we lost? Yes. But am I disappointed in their effort? No. Not at all,'" Ford said. "It's something to build off of. I've told them before, anybody can have a great game or a great practice and be on top of the world, but when you play a tight game like this against a good team it builds character, and if you don't take some character out of this, then you've really lost. But if you build character out of it, it's a win anyway."

The Rams, the defending Class 2 champions, were ranked No. 3 in the latest poll, and they left Zalma with the victory and a new lesson in putting a team away.

"We've got to learn to start off strong from the very beginning and not play a team to where we just beat them," Jennings said. "And that's one thing that we've tried to work on all year is not playing down to another's team's level and making them step up and play to us."