Lee, Lenox Athletes Earn Weekly Honors
Both this week’s iBerkshires.com/Southwestern Vermont Medical Center Athletes of the Week helped lead their teams to early-season rivalry wins.
On Wednesday and Thursday, the hottest team in the county posted its two biggest wins to date when the Lenox volleyball team beat Mount Greylock and Wahconah in a little more than 24 hours to improve to 6-0 this fall.
All of the Millionaires came up big as the team played nine sets in two days. Senior Claire O’Brien was one of the keys in the climactic fifth set in Dalton.
“Emily Barenski and Evelyn Julieano, getting every hard pass and our right side, Claire O’Brien, killing it,” Anna Nealon said. “She had seven serves in a row the last set. She was killing it.”
O’Brien started that pivotal run with an ace and ended with an ace off the net to essentially put the match out of reach with a 13-4 Lenox lead.
For the match, she had a team-high nine aces to go with five kills and four digs.
The day before, O’Brien had five aces, four kills and three digs in a 3-1 win over Mount Greylock, a team that Lenox had not beaten in seven years.
The Millionaires get another crack at the Mounties in a few weeks when they make the trip to Williamstown. This week, Lenox plays three home games, starting with Monday’s home game against Lee.
Speaking of the Wildcats, senior running back Dawson Reber set the tone by running for 41 yards in the first four plays for Lee in Friday night’s win at Monument Mountain.
He scored the game’s first touchdown on a 25-yard scamper and finished with 90 yards rushing, plus a couple of two-point conversion runs, in a convincing 42-6 win for Lee in the South County rivalry game.
Reber figures to be one of the keys to a multi-faceted running attack this fall for the Wildcats.
“Obviously, I think everyone knows Dawson was going to be able to turn out tough yards, and he really did,” Lee coach Tom Salinetti said. “But so did all our running backs today. And they’re such a selfless group back there.
“I think when we look at [the film], we’re going to say that we probably would have liked to have been a little more balanced with the carries and distributed that a little bit more. But they don’t care. As long as the team is having success, that’s all they care about. … They volunteer to do fewer carries. They volunteer to block for each other. It’s awesome.”
Lee will look to start the year 2-0 on Friday night when it heads to Wahconah.
The iBerkshires.com Athlete of the Week is sponsored by Southwestern Vermont Medical Center.