Bruins bump Kewpies after staving off rally

It’s 26-25 Hickman in the second game, and Rock Bridge’s Brandi Williamson misjudges the serve. The volleyball bounces off Williamson’s biceps rather than her forearm, hits her chin and falls to the ground. The Kewpies bench explodes because Hickman has tied the match at one game apiece.

With alternating chants of “Let’s Go Kewipes!” and “Let’s Go Rock Bridge!” reverberating off the empty upper-deck seats in Hearnes Center, Rock Bridge coach Beth Newton and Hickman coach Greg Gunn met with two different volleyball teams heading into the deciding third game.

Newton’s Bruins emerged from a back-and-forth battle with a victory, knocking off Hickman on Thursday night 25-20, 25-27, 25-21.

After dropping the second game, the Bruins huddled around their coach with slumped shoulders. Their body language expressed discouragement, but Newton told her players to keep their heads up.

“I said that we needed to stay focused and keep making the smart play,” Newton said.

Focusing in Hearnes Center was easier said than done, especially against a rival in an arena sounding like it was filled with a few thousand fans rather than the few hundred that did attend. But Lindsey McDaniel, one of six Bruins seniors celebrating senior night, looked at the third game with more optimism.

“We just decided, ‘Why play two games when you can play three?’” said McDaniel, between celebratory hugs after the match. “We had already decided that we were going to win this game. There was no way we were losing.”

Fifteen feet away, the young Kewpies, bouncing on the balls of their feet, surrounded Gunn while exchanging high-fives and grinning from ear to ear. Despite being in a far different situation than Newton’s, Gunn delivered a similar speech.

“I told them that they needed to keep their momentum,” Gunn said. “They were playing with focus and confidence, and they needed to keep doing that. They knew they could win.”

Gunn’s Kewpies, however, made a number of uncharacteristic and untimely errors in the third game, ultimately leading to their demise. Gunn attributed the team’s inability to finish the match in part to its youth.

“I guess you hope that’s why it happened,” Gunn said. “Immaturity will decrease over time, so we’ll get better in that sense.”

After the match, Newton said that her veteran club, half of which is seniors, did what an experienced team should do: stay composed and finish.

“That’s what you want from your seniors,” Newton said. “You want them to make the smart play under pressure, and they did.”

Closing out tight games has been a problem for Rock Bridge this season. An elated McDaniel, who finished with 15 assists and seven kills, including several in the last few points of the third game, explained after the match that the team just followed its assistant coach’s mantra.

“One of (assistant coach) Scott (Shelley’s) biggest sayings is to ‘Close the door’,” McDaniel said. “We finally did that tonight.”