O’Brien’s serving streak leads to Benet win

Shannon O’Brien has been working on her serving and it certainly paid off on Monday as the Benet senior put away 11 straight points from the service line to help the Redwings run away with the second game and complete a 25-19, 25-11 win over host Downers Grove South.

“I was consistent at the beginning of the year, but I still needed work,” said O’Brien. “I’ve been going to the gym and serving 50 balls a day. It’s going well, and I just went back there and did my thing.”

“Shannon was serving well,” said Benet coach Brad Baker. “She was able to keep hitting the same spot that was making it rough for them to pass.”

When O’Brien took over the serving the Redwings were up 3-1 and she helped bring it to 14-3 when Maddie Haggerty took over and put five more points on the Benet side of the ledger.

Then Brittany Kmieciak added two more and by the time the Mustangs got to side-out, they were down 21-1 and the match was virtually over.

To the Mustangs credit they fought back after that with a pair of four-point runs that made the score somewhat respectable.

Jenna Jendryk led the Redwings (17-1) with seven kills and two blocks, Nora Young put away four kills and had seven digs and Annie Ferlmann came up with nine digs.

The Redwings started slowly in game one, trailing 3-0 before they caught the Mustangs at 3-3 and went ahead, and after one more tie a point later, Benet never trailed.

“We didn’t play or practice over the weekend and I thought we were a little rusty at first,” said Baker. “We had multiple small errors in game one. But then we cleaned up our hitting, serving and serve-receive in the second game.”

Downers Grove South coach Trisha Kurth was disappointed in her team’s inability to pass during that long Benet point-spree.

“When you’re playing a good team like Benet, you just have to make the plays to stay in the game, no matter how much you’re down.” Kurth said. “Our passing broke down and we just made too many errors. Our passers just didn’t do the job in serve-receive. We played better in the first game and I was optimistic that we would put up a fight in the second.”

Olivia Zarek and Jessica Pikul had three kills each for the Mustangs.

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