Newtown High Continues To Spike The Competition

By Andy Hutchison

The defending South-West Conference champion girls’ volleyball team picked up where it left off a year ago, and has continued to roll through the competition. The Nighthawks carried a 13-0 mark into Wednesday’s scheduled visit to Bunnell of Stratford (after The Bee sports section went to press).

In fact, since losing to Lauralton Hall of Milford last October 6, the Nighthawks have reeled off 24 straight wins over SWC teams, including three in last year’s conference playoffs.

In each of Newtown’s first 11 matches this year, the Hawks required the minimum three games to earn victories. The Nighthawks finally dropped a game within their match at nonconference foe East Lyme in a 3-1 win on October 14, and dropped one in a 3-1 victory over Joel Barlow of Redding on Monday.

The Nighthawks expected to be good; they didn’t have a senior on the floor a year ago and brought almost everyone back into the fold. “We knew we were going to be good, but we had no idea we were going to be this good,” senior libero Abbey Doski said.

But Coach Tom Czaplinski doesn’t want his players to get caught up in the winning streak, nor does he believe the team has performed as well as it can.

“I’ve tried to keep them away from looking at how many wins and losses we have. It’s more important how we’re playing and I guess the silver lining is we haven’t been playing that well and we’ve been getting away with beating teams,” Czaplinski said. “The talent’s there, the ability’s there — it’s just a matter of focusing more.”

Against visiting Barlow on Monday, Newtown pulled out a wild 33-31 win in game one, which featured ten lead changes and 16 ties. The Falcons were at match point a handful of times but just couldn’t put away the Nighthawks.

“For us to continue to fight and claw our way back, it shows a little bit of something for the girls,” Czaplinski said.

Of course, the coach believes his team put itself up against the wall in the opening game against the Falcons by not playing as well as it should have.

“We went back and forth the whole time and to know we were the ones to finally put it out is rewarding,” Doski said.

Newtown went up 2-0 with a 25-16 win in game two. The Hawks built a 12-4 lead, prompting a Barlow time out. After NHS saw its lead trimmed to 17-13, an Emma Herring kill got her team back on track.

NHS built an early 6-0 lead in the third game before succumbing to Barlow, 25-21, forcing a fourth game. The Nighthawks closed out the match with a 25-20 win in the fourth game.

Setter Jess Lynch compiled 32 assists, Herring had 13 kills and five service aces, Carly Iwanicki came up with 15 digs and 13 kills, and Doski had 25 digs and three aces. The Nighthawks used some tremendous diving defensive efforts by Doski to keep the ball in play throughout the match against a tough Barlow team that had suffered only one other loss, to Newtown in mid-September.

Czaplinski would like to see improvement several areas, but also points out that the team has some very important strengths.

“Our ball control’s been very strong for the most part — our ball control and our serving is what’s winning a majority of the games for us,” Czaplinski said. “We need to be a little smarter in our decisionmaking, like when to tip, when to swing, set selection — who to give the ball to at what times — and our defense definitely needs to pick up. We’re in the wrong spots at certain times. Ball control and serving have been huge assets for us and those are the biggest parts of volleyball.”

“I think we definitely need to go full-throttle for the whole game,” said Doski, adding that the Nighthawks come out strong, finish strong, but let opponents back into the match in the mid-stages of the games.

“We definitely need to work on our focus in the middle of the games,” Lynch said.

Despite the lapses in focus during matches, overall focus has a strength for this squad, Lynch believes. “We’re just staying focused and doing what we can each game because each game is just as important as the next,” she said.

Doski says the team members have been working together and pushing each other to improve throughout the season.

The Nighthawks, following the match with 9-3 Bunnell, will play four more regular-season matches before going back to the postseason with targets on their backs the SWC playoffs and something to prove in the state tournament. Newtown, after a first-round bye, was ousted from last year’s Class LL tourney. The playoff excitement gets going with the start of the SWC tourney on November 1.