Thursday night the Lady Rangers took on their rivals: Forest Hills Northern. Head coach Natalie Roelfzema said that the team anticipated a hard and tough match due to the fact that Northern is equal in competition.

“I think the girls [the team] were anticipating a very tough game going into this game just because Northern is usually pretty equal in competition.” said Roelfzema.

The Rangers may have anticipated a tough match, but they did win in the first two sets of the game. Even though the Rangers won, the game was off to a intense start. It was back and forth between the two energetic teams throughout most of the night, seemingly making the game more extreme.

In the first play of the game, the Rangers struggled a bit when Northern had the first serve and it found its way to the back row, where it was then set up in an attempt to score. The attack was hit just outside of the line, scoring a point for Northern. After that, the Rangers got it back and went on a serving spree which scored the Rangers four more points.

Sophomore Kelsey Toole, in order to score her team a point, ducked at a serve hoping it would go out and it did, missing the court entirely. This put the Rangers ahead followed by freshman Tatum Otolski, who had a great serving streak that put the Rangers even further in the lead. Towards the end of the set, the Lady Rangers hit the ball into the net and it was saved by sophomore Kaia McCuien. That last play ended the first set and won the match for FHC.

At the start of the second set, the first play was another attack made by FHC but this time, they scored the point. The defense was great in this set, Kelsey had some great digs on the ball and kept it off the floor.

The Rangers were not as back in forth in this set as they were in the first one, them staying ahead of the Huskies won them the game.

Northern seeked to come back hard with some attacks in order for them to get back in the game. The Huskies made an attempt at an attack on the Rangers, but just as that happened, Kaia jumped up for the block and it worked. The block earned FHC another point in the game, and that shut FHN down very quickly. The Rangers also communicated really well tonight and that helped them secure the win.

“The communication was really good tonight, it is definitely getting better.” Kaia said.

During the last few minutes of the game, Northern called a timeout in hopes of increasing their score, however, that did not happen. Instead of FHN trying to make a comeback, FHC denied them entirely. The Rangers scored two more points before Northern got the ball back, it was 24-15. The Rangers knew what they had to do, so in the final play of the game, sophomore Lauren Schofield set the ball to a open back corner on the court and scored the winning point.

Roelfzema is very happy with the way the team played tonight.

“I think overall, the team did phenomenal,” Roelfzema said. “We’ve been working on a lot of different things to progress our defense, our offense, our blocking. Tonight was one of the first times I have seen them using what we worked on in practice.”