NATICK — Heads or tails?
That 50-50 nature was the texture of a decisive fifth set for Natick boys volleyball coach Peter Suxho after he watched Tenth-seeded Newton North storm again from a two-set deficit towards his group in a Div. 1 second-round affair Tuesday night.
But even after the Tigers’ stars fueled a vicious comeback to suck a lot of the house crowd’s power out of the constructing, the No. 7 RedHawks mustered collectively sufficient of the mistake-free play that constructed the large result in survive a cutthroat last body for a 3-2 win (25-23, 25-13, 18-25, 17-25, 15-13) immediately traditional.
On the underside of momentum, tails didn’t fail for Natick to beat its Bay State Conference foe after splitting the common season sequence, advancing to play the winner of Westford Academy versus New Bedford within the quarterfinals.
“It’s like flipping a coin, what happened in the fifth set,” Suxho mentioned. “Newton North is a good team. At this stage of the season, everybody plays (hard). It’s not like in season, you’ve got another game. You go home now or you stay, so it’s really hard. … We’re getting there. … I feel strong for (the) next game.”
Natick surged to a 2-0 lead regardless of three key gamers simply rejoining the squad final week due to COVID, using high quality protection in any respect phases as Newton North struggled to persistently get good attacking alternatives. Kendall Jackson (12 kills), Nicholas Bonavire (seven kills) and Luke Rossi (three kills, two blocks) fed off Harrison Landry (18 assists) and Branch Barnes (10 assists) to fill within the areas of an array of Newton North errors early on, seemingly operating to a win.
But after Kaz Veitas (15 kills, 4 aces), Adam Christianson (10 kills), Sam Huang (eight blocks) and Tyler Randall (29 assists, three blocks) began clicking on all cylinders, the Tigers had all the excitement heading into the fifth body. Natick had simply three runs of three straight factors in that span after producing six over the primary two frames.
Natick grabbed a fast lead on just a few extra Newton North errors early within the fifth, although, and that set the tone for the remainder of the way in which. Veitas and Christianson paired with Michael Barnette to maintain the rating inside two factors till the very finish with massive blocks and kills, however the group dedicated 11 errors in comparison with the RedHawks’ 5.
That included a service error to interrupt a 13-13 tie, and couldn’t get it over the web on the ultimate play to assist Natick advance.
“In these kind of games, you can’t have mistakes. Newton North, down 2-0, they came back strong,” Suxho mentioned. “We didn’t do anything to win the game, they gave it to us … they had mistakes (on the final two points), we didn’t. … We got lucky.”
Source: www.bostonherald.com