Serving Gogebic, Iron and Ontonagon Counties
Serving Gogebic, Iron and Ontonagon Counties
By JASON JUNO
MERCER, Wis. — Mercer has improved a lot before their rather late home opener thanks to some tough competition at tournaments across the state.
The home crowd saw them sweep South Shore Tuesday on a special night for senior hitter Eiley Schoeneman, who tallied her 1,000th career kill.
Mercer is up to sixth in the Division 5 coaches poll and they’re a tough matchup for a lot of teams.
“I think we’re doing well, I feel like our last tournament in the Dells definitely helped,” Schoeneman said. “We got seventh and played some very tough teams, Division 1, 2 teams. I feel like that helped us improve to move on to conference play.”
Coach Robyn Schoeneman agreed those types of opponents have made the Tigers better, and that they’ve improved a lot, especially in the last week, which included the weekend tournament at Wisconsin Dells.
“That’s why we go to those tournaments because we want to be tough and when we come back home and we play teams a little bit more locally, we’re prepared,” she said. “And when we’re playing these games, we’re working on execution instead of learning where to be.”
Eiley Schoeneman notched a team-best 13 kills in Tuesday’s match and stands at 1,011 kills for her career.
“Eiley is powerful and can hit to pretty much anywhere,” Robyn, also her mom, said. “She sees the court pretty well and has worked extremely hard on her approach.”
Eiley knew she was close to 1,000 total kills, but she didn’t know it was coming Tuesday night.
“It’s pretty special,” Robyn said. “It was important to her, it was a goal she set for herself. She’s a great kid and she deserves to achieve greatness because she works really, really hard.”
As much as the Tigers have been playing on the road, it was a lucky break that it happened at home.
“It’s a big deal, especially on my home court,” Eiley said.
“I feel so proud of her,” senior teammate Jenny Klopatek said. “Being along her side through second grade, third grade and accomplishing this together with her just means a lot to me as her best friend.”
Schoeneman also had six aces and seven assists. Klopatek had a great night as well, finishing with a dozen kills, 12 assists and five aces. Rylinn Rossi had three kills and three aces. Anya Brandenburg had six assists and two aces.
Klopatek, like her coach and teammate, likes where the team is at a month before the WIAA postseason begins.
“I think we’ve actually been coming together as a team really well,” she said. “We do have new freshmen and exchange students with us and I think they’re getting better each day, getting more confident.”
Coach Schoeneman said they got some of the jitters out from playing at home for the first time. And she has a couple of things for them to work on.
“We tried some different things, we’ve got to work on getting better passes so that we can run our offense a little bit better. When that comes together, I think it’s going to be pretty awesome,” she said.
Mercer (12-7, 2-0) goes to Washburn Thursday night.
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WISCONSIN DELLS, Wis. — Mercer, the smallest school at a 16-team invite last weekend, finished in seventh place at Just A Game Fieldhouse.
They played seven challenging matches in two days.
“The girls battled from the first serve,” coach Schoeneman said.
The Tigers placed third in their pool during the first day. They beat Markesan 25-22, 25-17 but lost to a good Marathon team 25-15, 25-12 and eventual tournament champion Hillsboro 25-21, 25-17.
They started the second day with a win over Suring 25-20, 25-22. With that win, Mercer went to the tough gold bracket and faced off against Abundant Life Christian from Madison. Mercer fell 25-14, 25-23.
“Our goal was to get double digits against them as their lineup was comparable to a college squad,” Schoeneman said. “Despite the loss, we played great.”
The tired Tigers then lost 25-9, 25-21 to Wabeno-Laona.
They thought they were done and had even changed out of their uniforms only to find out they had another match to play against Division 2 Adams-Friendship.
“It was the tournament we thought would never end,” Schoeneman said.
But it was a good win against a really good Adams-Friendship team.
“Despite being completely exhausted, we ended on a high note and felt really good about the progress we made,” Schoeneman said.
