Perkins makes statement with sweep of Bellevue

PERKINS TWP. — Perkins was ready from the first point. The Pirates raced out to the first 11 points of Monday's Northern Ohio Conference crossover match against Bellevue. Perkins never looked back. The Pirates got 22 kills from sophomore Viera Walker and defeated the Lady Red 25-12, 25-11, 26-24 inside a hot Perkins gymnasium. The win snapped a seven-match losing streak by the Pirates to Bellevue. "It had to be a statement win," Perkins coach Brandon Duvall said. "They're good. That's Bellevue, so we knew what we were going to get. They're undefeated. Up to this point, they had been playing good volleyball. They're not going to give you easy wins." Addi Mason served up the final 10 points of the opening run after a serving error by Bellevue opened the match. She had two of her five aces on the night in the run. Meanwhile, Walker smacked three kills during the run. A net violation on the Lady Red and another blast from Walker made it 13-1. "You can tell when you don't have to say much to the team," Duvall said. "They understood the match. They understood who we were playing. They understood it was a big match for us. I watched us warm up and I thought it was going to be good because we were on point." The Pirates (4-1) pushed the lead to 18-4 later on a Walker ace. Bellevue (4-1) won five straight points to claw within 18-9, but Perkins dominated the rest of the set. Mason tallied a kill before a pair of errors by the Lady Red gave the Pirates the early lead. "Everything went wrong," Bellevue coach Liana Petitti said. "You have to come out and be ready to play. That's the end of the story and we didn't do that tonight at all." The break between sets did little to cool off Perkins. Behind more tremendous serving from Mason, the Pirates raced out to a 6-0 lead in Set 2. Perkins then won four straight points — three on kills from Walker — to make it 10-2. A service error by Bellevue made it 16-5. After some back and forth, Perkins strung together another 6-0 run to go up 23-8. A two-hit error on the Lady Red and service error gave the Pirates a stranglehold on the match. "If you open the door to Bellevue, they're not only going to kick it open, but they're going to walk through it," said Duvall of playing well in Set 2. "We knew we had to stay on top of them. We talk all the time about our competitive factor and sustaining competitiveness. I thought we did a great job in the first two sets of staying competitive and high energy." Bellevue showed its best fight in Set 3. The Lady Red won the first two points of the set to take their first lead of the night and kills from Mazie Gracemyer and Finley LaPata gave Bellevue a 10-7 edge. Bellevue kept the lead until a 9-2 run by Perkins put the Pirates ahead 21-15. Perkins grinded from there and went up 24-21 on a Bellevue error. The Lady Red kept fighting, getting a kill from Jocelynn Heuring and a block from Zoe Crooks to tie the set at 24. But, Brooklyn Cassidy put her final kill of the night away before one final ace from Mason sealed the win for the Pirates. Cassidy added 12 kills and 11 digs, providing another big hitting option for Perkins alongside Walker. "I'm very proud of Viera," Duvall said. "I was hoping we could get her a record tonight, but I think she struggled a little bit from the heat. But, that's because she was giving a ton. She had 22 kills in three sets. That's a lot. "Luckily for us when Viera wasn't getting it done, we had Brooklyn getting it done." Bellevue is off until Thursday when it hosts Tiffin Columbian (2-2) in another NOC crossover contest. "You can't get cocky. You can't get arrogant," Petitti said. "And I don't know if that's what it was, but everybody wants to beat us right now. That's what it is. Every single team that we play is good. Nobody we play is bad. You have to come ready to go all the time every day." Braelyn Davie added 31 assists and seven digs while Mason registered 18 digs. Avisi Gehlot tallied eight digs and Reese Schaefer lined five kills. The match was the first of three in four days for Perkins. The Pirates are back in action Tuesday at Port Clinton before hosting Edison on Thursday. "Our huddle after the match was 100 percent about the science of nutrition and what we need to do," Duvall said. "Luckily, coach (Kristen) Maldonado is a nutritionist. She'll send something out about what it means to hydrate and when to hydrate. How we respond is going to be how we feel with our bodies."