Photo by Jake McNeill: Marshall middle blocker Audree Larson (13) reacts after a Tiger point during the first set of a Class A volleyball tournament quarterfinal matchup against Monticello on Wednesday night at the Xcel Energy Center in St. Paul. The second-seeded Tigers swept Monticello to advance to Friday's semifinals against Stewartville.

ST. PAUL — A strong defensive effort from the second-seeded Marshall volleyball team led the Tigers to a straight-sets win over Monticello in the Class AAA quarterfinals at the Xcel Energy Center on Wednesday night by scores of 25-14, 25-16 and 25-17. Marshall has now won a state tournament winner’s bracket match in six of the last seven seasons, excluding the 2020 season in which the tournament was canceled due to COVID-19.

Both teams entered the match with state tournament experience, with Monticello advancing to the state tournament each of the past four years and Marshall advancing each of the past seven. While Monticello has been, Marshall has prevailed with state titles each of the past three seasons and the championship pedigree showed.

“I think that having that win in previous years has always been in the back of our mind… but we knew we had to take it one game at a time,” Marshall outside hitter Reese Drake said. “I think losing those seniors [from last year’s state championship run], we all knew that we had to just step up and fill their roles.”

Marshall head coach Dan Westby noted that overall, this year’s Class AAA tournament field skews younger. With the exception of Ella Demars, whose 11 kills were a team-high, all of Monticello’s impact players are in their junior season or younger, making them a team that could continue to contend in future years and making them a team Westby said he feels fortunate to have gotten by.

Marshall held Monticello to a .030 hitting percentage on the day, including a -.077 mark in the first set and a -.053 mark in the second. Marshall, meanwhile, hit .279 in the match, including a peak of .433 in the clinching third set.

The Tigers’ defensive success started at the net, where Marshall tallied seven total blocks to the Magic’s four. Avery Fahl led Marshall with five block assists while Laurel Ryks and Halle DeVos contributed three and two repectively. Drake also had the lone ace block for Marshall.

“We’ve been trying to be disciplined on pressing over the net. Once you’ve set up your block and make it stable, they try to hit around it,” Brooke Gillingham said of the team’s blocking success. “That’s when they start to err more, when they try to get around your block, because you’ve shown that you can block them.”

Westby noted that Monticello is a team that has some tall players, with four players standing at 6-foot-flat or taller. He specifically cited the insertion of Ellie Koprek into the lineup as something that caught Marshall off guard by making the Magic taller, and the 6-foot-1 Abby Ruda also made an impact with an ace block and two block assists. 

Still, Westby said that he felt his team put together one of their best blocking matches of the year, not necessarily in terms of ace block totals but in terms of its ability to slow balls down up front.

Fahl also attributed the team’s defensive success to stellar play on the back line. Drake and Kezlyn Pinckney led the team with 13 and 11 digs respectively. Kezlyn Pinckney also received 20 serves without an error on the night while Kya Pinckney contributed another 10 service receptions.

Early in the first set, neither team could pull away early on. It wasn’t until after an Alayna Opatz kill for Monticello tied the set at 4-4 that Marshall dug deep to pull out the first multi-point lead of the set. 

A Magic service error gave Marshall the lead and Drake came up with a kill to make it 6-4. After a Marshall service error put Monticello back on the board, the Tigers capitalized on a service error and three consecutive attacking errors to jump out to a 10-5 lead.

Marshall kept the Magic at arm’s length from there, maintaining a steady lead between three and six points. A rally with two kills from Ryks, another from Drake and a block from Ryks and Fahl gave Marshall an 18-11 advantage with a 4-1 scoring run. 

A pair of Marshall errors gave Monticello another pair of points but Marshall closed on a 7-1 run from there, including three kills from Ryks, two from Gillingham and another from Drake.

Drake and Fahl were both major contributors on each of Marshall’s last two state championship runs while Gillingham was named to the All-Tournament team in her first season with varsity last year. Westby said the team was going to lean a bit on those three veterans early on and the three rose to the challenge.

Drake led all hitters in the match with 13 kills on a .333 hitting percentage. Ryks got her first varsity kill in last year’s state championship match and picked right back up where she left off, adding another 12 kills on a team-best .458 hitting percentage. Setting up those kills, Fahl and Gillingham tallied 18 and 12 set assists respectively, as well as five kills for Fahl and another four for Gillingham.

The Tigers found themselves in a rare deficit early in the second set when two kills apiece from Opatz and Ruda led the Magic to a 7-3 lead. Still, the Tigers showed no signs of panic. A Drake kill got Fahl to the service line and three Magic attacking errors and a Fahl ace flipped the script for an 8-7 Marshall lead.

“We just had to go back to our skills and fundamentals. When we think of that, then we know we can play together as a team and do what we’ve trained to do,” Fahl said. 

Klara Schultz helped the Magic rally back ahead by a score of 11-9 with a pair of kills but Monticello couldn’t extend the lead beyond two points. 

Trailing 13-11, a Fahl kill put Drake at the service line, where she oversaw a 7-0 run to seize all momentum. Fahl had a pair of kills and assisted blocks with Ryks and Halle DeVos on the run while Ryks also contributed another kill. They rode the momentum of that run to a 25-16 win.

“[Drake’s service run] was kind of the difference in that set. In a match like this, you don’t get those very often because the teams on the other side of the net are here for a reason: because they’re good teams,” Westby said. “Generally they’ll handle the ball well, but I thought… we struggled in set 1 serving a bit, we had a number of errors in set 1 and cleaned that up… We’re the kind of team that we have to be able to put some pressure on teams and one way to do that is with the serve, so I thought that was a really good weapon for us tonight.”

As a team, Marshall finished with four service aces to Monticello’s one. Kezlyn Pinckney led the team with two service aces while Fahl and Gillingham each logged another.

Like the second set, Marshall fell behind early in the third. Also like the second set, that didn’t remain the case for long.

The Magic jumped out to an early 3-0 lead behind two kills from Opatz, who finished the night with 11 of the Magic’s 29 kills. Her .054 hitting percentage made her one of two players on Monticello to finish with a positive hitting percentage, the other being Koprek with a .714 mark for five kills.

Monticello’s lead quickly evaporated as kills from Fahl, Drake and Ryks led to Marshall tying the set at 5-all. The teams alternated points until Drake got back-to-back kills to give Marshall its first lead of the set at 9-8.

Still, Marshall wasn’t able to extend that lead any further. It wasn’t until they faced a 13-12 deficit that they locked in to rally ahead. A Monticello service error and a block from Ryks and Fahl gave Marshall the lead. After a Frie kill, Marshall’s Fahl and Ryks each got a kill and a Monticello attacking error prompted the Magic to call a timeout trailing 17-14.

Monticello scored three of the next four points out of the timeout but it was all Marshall from there. Drake got kills on three of the next four points, with the other point being a Pinckney ace. A Gillingham kill and a Monticello error brought up match point, and another well-placed serve gave Pinckney another ace to cap off an 8-0 Tiger run with a 25-17 Tiger victory.

With the win, Marshall is set to face off against Stewartville in the Class AAA semifinals. Sitting as the No. 3 seed, Stewartville defeated Cretin-Derham Hall 3-1 in the quarterfinals on Wednesday behind 31 digs from Katherine Klavetter and 13 kills from Ella Theobald. 

While the semifinals are approaching rapidly, Marshall will be doing something on its off day that Wesby doesn’t recall having done before in his 20 years as the program’s head coach: traveling to watch a football game. 

The Marshall football team qualified for the state tournament with a win over Hutchinson last week, so the volleyball team will be heading over to Woodbury to watch the Tigers take on Byron in the quarterfinals.

“I’m not sure that I’m, as a head coach, making the right decision, but they’re high school kids and they need to support their classmates and the rest of the kids at the school,” Westby said, adding that he’s glad that it’s a fairly early start at 6 p.m. “I don’t know if I’m going to go because I may end up watching film and that sort of thing, but that would be part of our day… It is what it is. Like I said, they’re high school kids and that’s part of their high school experience, so we’re going to let them enjoy it.”

The Marshall volleyball team’s quest for a fourth consecutive state title will continue on Friday at 11 a.m. on Court 1 at the Xcel Energy Center.