Douglas spikers beat South Tahoe

Pit the No. 1 and No. 3 ranked teams in the region in a league match and this is what you're bound to get.

The Douglas High volleyball team outlasted South Tahoe Thursday night, taking a hard-fought 25-21, 21-25, 25-22, 25-20 win against the Vikings that, as hard as it might be to believe, was even closer than the scores indicated.

Both squads exhibited plenty of hustle and fought numerous marathon points to six or seven trips over the net.

South Tahoe benefited from its strong service game all night, getting 12 aces as a team. Douglas, on the other hand, spent most of its energy at the net, getting 45 kills and 15 blocks as a team.

The Vikings jumped out to a 9-4 lead early on, mostly building off Douglas errors and some solid blocking from Stephanie Morrow, Dana Jensen and Jessica Bettencourt.

Douglas' first kill came nearly 10 minutes into the match as Katy Marsh set up Dawson Joyce-Mendive to cut the lead to 9-5.

The squads battled back and forth through the rest of the set before Douglas stole the momentum with kills from Whitney Estes and Monica Knight to take a 22-18 lead and hold on from there.

South Tahoe came right back in the next set, trading punches with the Tigers until pushing ahead with kills from Bettencourt, Jensen, an ace from Coral Warren and a block from Shaylene McLaughlin.

The Vikings clinched the game with some scrappy play all over the floor, battling many of the late points to great length and making a number of incredible saves.

South Tahoe rode the momentum from the second game to take a 19-14 lead in game three, but Douglas recovered to go on an 11-3 run to close out the game highlighted by five kills and two aces. The Tigers tied the game up on a particularly impressive 6-1 run.

The final game was more of the same - each team taking its mini runs and taking turns holding onto the momentum.

Douglas closed it all out with four Knight kills, an ace from Megan Myers and a kill from Alex Risko on the final point of the match.

Knight finished the match with 14 kills against her former school while Joyce-Mendive had 10 kills, Whitney Estes had nine, Shariece Steel had five and Risko had four.

Myers contributed three kills, two assists, four blocks and two aces.

Katy Marsh had 38 assists for the Tigers.

The Vikings were led by a balanced front of Jensen (11 kills), Bettencourt (nine kills) and Warren (seven kills) and got an additional four aces from Bettencourt.

Stephanie Morrow dished out 19 assists for South Tahoe.