Bloodhounds down Demons to grab SEC No. 2 seed

WASHINGTON - Tuesday was the last night of regular season Southeast Conference volleyball matches and while Burlington High School finished 5-0 with a 3-0 win at Mt. Pleasant, Ft. Madison and Washington both had 2-2 records. After Fairfield defeated Keokuk to leave both of those SEC records at 2-3, the winner between the Bloodhounds and the Demons would be the second seed in the SEC tourney starting next Thursday.

The match was tied after the first two sets, but Ft. Madison kicked it in over the last two sets and took a 3-1 victory.

'The first two sets Washington played us very tough,” FM coach Kent Bailey said. 'Their serve receive then broke down a little bit and ours got better. I thought that was the telling story.”

'I don't necessarily think it was about our serve receive,” Washington coach Lexa Mahr said. 'I could tell in the first five points of the match that we did not mentally show up. Physically, we were here. Mentally, we were not. I could just tell. It's obvious when we are on and when we are off. We had a pretty good warm-up, but then the first five or six points of that first set, we were not there.”

Mahr called time trailing 17-13 in the opener, but the Demons lost 25-18.

Addison Six started the second set with a kill and Demon teammate Hannah Anderson connected for a 4-0 lead. Olivia Marek's kill after a FM timeout gave the Demons a 14-9 advantage. A Taylor Brinning dig and an Alexa Mitchell tip made it 20-15 but FM closed it to 20-19 before Mahr called time. An ace by Samantha Farmer made it 23-20 and a marek spike gave the Demons a 25-20 win. 20-25, 25-10, 25-9

'Taylor Brinning is hungry,” Mahr said. 'She wants the ball. She wants to be here. I gave her a chance and she proved that she should be passing. She did not guess. She followed the ball to the line. She did not watch it drop three feet in. She was going after everything, she was diving, she did what I asked her to do.”

FM answered in the third set by taking leads of 8-2, 13-3 and 16-5 before a 25-10 win.

'I don't know if you would call it finding a weakness, but we do tend to pick on one person when we serve,” Bailey said. 'We want to make them think, ‘why does the ball keep coming to me.' It's not about whether they are good or bad, it's about getting in their head a little bit.”

'We did some things right physically, but we did not have our mental focus,” Mahr said. 'That ate away at us. Tip after tip, it just ate away at us. It showed.”

FM (17-7 overall) led 12-2 in the fourth, before the Demons rallied with Kills by Six and Anderson, but the Bloodhounds closed it out behind the serving of Grace Pumphrey and kills from Kylee Cashman and Jillian Wiseman.

'I thought it was all a mental thing about us,” Mahr said. 'It was not what Ft. Madison did to us. It was mental mistakes on our part. One mistake compacted and went onto the next one. I told them in the locker room that when you are down 12-2, it is hard to come back from that. There were some positives there at the end that I saw. We started to do some things right, but once they get that big of a cushion, we are not gonna come back from that.”

Washington is 7-17 overall and doesn't play until the SEC tournament Tuesday, Oct. 8, at Burlington.