Sweren Serves Mounties to Tournament Rout
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Sweren served 18 aces, and Celina Savage notched 14 kills in the 25-12, 25-6, 25-6 victory to send the top-seeded Mounties into the semi-finals of the eight-team tourney.
“I just focused on my toss and trying to put it in a good spot,” Sweren said.
Kelsey MacHaffie had eight aces and Talia Kapiloff had three for the Mounties, who compiled 32 aces as a team in the three-set win.
Early trouble on Mount Greylock’s serve receive allowed Pioneer Valley to take a 5-1 lead in the first set.
But Sweren went to the back line with her team facing a 5-2 deficit and did not give up the serve until it had a 13-6 lead.
Mount Greylock’s coach said she is a versatile player who can help the Mounties in a lot of places.
“She’s a very clutch, reliable player,” Greg Geyer said. “She does everything really well. We’d love to have her hitting more, getting her more swings, but we obviously have a lot of good hitters.”
Short service runs by Kapiloff and Charlotte Coody (three kills, two aces) later in the set pushed the margin to 22-11, and a kill by Savage gave Mount Greylock its first set point at 24-11. Two serves later, a service error ended the set.
In Set No. 2, it was a 10-point run on MacHaffie’s serve that opened up a 15-1 lead for the Mounties. Sweren had a more modest four-point run to get the margin to 20-2, and Giana Pesce eventually served out the set.
The final set went back and forth in the early stages before Sweren got the serve with the Mounties ahead, 14-11.
She served seven straight points to open up a 10-point margin, and Pioneer Valley never got any closer.
Kapiloff had an ace to set up match point, which came when the visitors could not return a deep ball from Pesce off a Sweren set.
Mount Greylock (14-3), which started the week ranked third in the commonwealth in Division 5, moves on to Friday’s semi-final against either Mohawk Trail or Lenox, who meet on Wednesday in Buckland.
“We’re coming together as a team in a lot of ways,” Geyer said. “And we’re playing our system well. We always have stuff to work on, every day, and we’ll be working on a couple of things tomorrow.”