Spartan Volleyball Falls to Evanston in Regional Final

Evanston's girls volleyball team had a hot hand in Casey Durham and rode it to a regional title against Glenbrook North.

Durham had a match-high 14 kills to pace the No. 2 seed Wildkits to a 25-20, 25-21 win over the No. 5 Spartans in the Evanston Regional final Thursday night. Evanston advances to the Glenbrook South Sectional, where they will play the hosts on Tuesday.

The Spartans (20-7) hung tough, but Evanston (26-9) made late runs in each game anchored by Durham’s offense.

“For me it just goes from game to game,” Durham said. “(Setter Arianna Sales) was putting them up there really well.”

The first game was a tight affair, with neither team going ahead by more than two points until Evanston grabbed the lead for good following a timeout. The Spartans led 19-18 when Evanston coach Pam MacPherson called a timeout. The Wildkits responded by taking the next five points and seized control in the game before taking it 25-20.

MacPherson said the timeout was to stop the Spartans’ strong serving.

“We needed to slow down their server and kind of reset our serve-receive,” the coach said. “If we have serve-receive we have an offense and we’ve got a great offense, but we need to be able to pass the ball in order to use our offense.”

The Wildkits showed off their offense, but had to grind out the match. The Spartans got off to a strong start in game two, taking an 11-8 lead, but lost the next five points. GBN came back to tie it, but did not take another lead.

Junior Patricia Hare led the Spartans with seven kills. Sophomore Kate Kamin had six and Whitney Landman added five, all coming in the first game.

Serve and receive was the name of the game on Thursday. Evanston cleaned up its passing down the stretch while GBN coach Chris Cooper said the Spartans’ serve-receive broke down late in each game. The typically strong serving Spartans also made seven service errors in the match.

“I think we missed a few more serves (than normal) in both games,” Cooper said. “We kept kind of shooting ourselves in the foot with missed serves. You gotta serve this team tough or else they just cram it down your throat.”

The loss marked the end of a successful season for the Spartans despite the regional loss.

“We had 20 wins and I don’t think we’ve done that in a while,” Cooper said. “We swept conference at every level, which I don’t know if we’ve ever done that with the girls program, so there’s nothing to hang our heads about.“ 

“In some of our matches against some of the bigger teams we’ve played, we’ve kind of just died and not fought,” Cooper added. “I don’t feel like we did that tonight. I think they fought every point of the game and we just fell a little short.”

While Kamin, Hare and sophomore Lauren Emmert (3 kills) will be back to anchor what should be a potent Spartans’ offense, the team graduates nine seniors including Landman and setter Abby Shamis.