Douglas volleyball cruises to victory

It took the Douglas volleyball team just 63 minutes to breeze through the first round of the Northern 4A Regional volleyball tournament Wednesday night.

That was unfortunate for the Elko Indians, as they'd driven nearly five hours to Minden just to see their season come to an abrupt end.

Douglas cruised to a 25-10, 25-19, 25-17 win and quickly turned its attention to a Friday night semifinal match at Manogue against either the Miners or McQueen.

"We're in the semis, but we need one more win to get to state," Douglas coach Suzi Townsell said. "We've got some things we need to work on. Our serving wasn't great tonight, so that's one thing. We'll have to step things up. We want to show something new on Friday, add some new plays on offense, something we haven't shown as much this season."

Douglas jumped out to a 17-5 lead in the first game and pushed ahead with a boost from seven service aces (The Tigers had a total of 12 in the match).

Taryn Williams had 11 kills and four blocks for Douglas and Jessica Waggoner had 11 blocks, seven kills and five aces.

Megan Mitchell had 20 assists, seven kills and two aces, Mysta Townsell had 15 digs and Bryanna Schinzing had nine blocks and two kills.

Elko played Douglas fairly even through the second, getting out to an 11-10 lead at one point before the Tigers went on a 10-3 run to pull away.

The Indians built leads of 6-2 and 9-5 in the final game before an 8-1 run from the Tigers essentially put the match away.

"Our serve receive was very good tonight," Townsell said. "Blocking was OK. I knew they were going to try to tip us all over the place and we were ready for that."

Douglas got two kills apiece from Jourdan Burke and Emily Garcia, while Rebecca Antti, Christine DuPuis. Jamie Lorntzen and Townsell each had one.

Lorntzen had seven blocks and Antti and Garcia each finished with six. Jordan Marsh put up seven digs, Mia Townsell had four digs and Jackie Harper had an assist in the win.

Douglas improved to 34-1 on the year overall and remained unbeaten against Nevada teams.