Murphy girls get revenge on top-ranked Robbinsville

    Murphy – When the Murphy girls volleyball team suffered their first loss of the season to the Robbinsville Lady Knights on Sept. 5, Lady Dogs coach Nikol Edwards warned that her team would be more prepared for the rematch.
    Nine games later, when the Class 1A-leading Lady Knights came to the Dawg Pound on Oct. 3 for the teams’ second meeting, the Lady Bulldogs backed up Edwards’ claim.
    “I walked into our locker room right before our first warm up and I could see it,” Edwards said.
“Like they were ready. And it wasn’t one of those excited feelings, it was determined.”
    Murphy (15-2) opened the match with a haymaker, overwhelming Robbinsville (14-2) at the net with a barrage of heavy hits, including some missiles launched off the hands of junior Sarah Pullium, who finished with 10 kills.
    “We actually stayed a long time after practice yesterday cause her timing had been a little off and she’s just been kinda all over the place,” Edwards said of Pullium’s strong performance in the victory.
    “That wasn’t something I did. She went out there, her and Grace Nelson went out there for probably 30 more minutes and again, that’s them. They want it and you can’t coach that, you can’t coach that want to. They were determined, they were motivated, they were ready. … I just had to give them that little nudge.”
    The Lady Dogs quickly jumped ahead 17-5, and with the Murphy crowd rocking and momentum behind them, closed out the first set for a resounding 25-13 set win.
    With the tone established, Murphy continued to batter Robbinsville in the second set, carrying over its hot hitting from the first.
    The Lady Dogs rose to a 6-0 lead, however the Lady Knights managed to stem the tide temporarily, whittling their deficit to 12-10 at one point.
    However, Murphy continued to pour it on, closing out the set 25-17 and claiming the two-set advantage going into the third.
    Facing a hefty 2-0 deficit, the Lady Knights rallied to claim the third set 25-21 in a tightly contested set of rallies that had the packed gymnasium on the edge of their seats.
    Murphy came out calm, cool and collected in the fourth set, putting the third-set loss behind them and continuing to hit aggressively at the net.
    “Going into the fourth, she just said, ‘Hey, that last set, you’ve got to push that aside, it happens,’” senior Hailey Bowman, who led Murphy with 13 kills, said of Edward’s message to the team entering the fourth frame.
    “She said we needed to talk more, cover more and that we had to want it… like capital w-a-n-t want it. And so we went out there and we did it for everyone out here, because I know everyone was pulling for us.”
    The team’s exchanged points for the majority of the fourth set, with Murphy jumping ahead by two points and Robbinsville rallying to tie the match time-and-time again.
    Eventually after the team’s found themselves tied at 20-20, the Lady Dogs created a bit of separation at the very end of the set, going on a 5-2 run to claim the fourth set and grant the Lady Knights a taste of their own medicine.
    “It was kind of emotional actually,” Pullium said of the locker room atmosphere following the Lady Dogs’ win. “We were hugging each other because we were just so proud of each other for coming together and doing that. Because we’ve had a bit of a rough patch lately and the fact that we finally got to do that is just really special to us.”
    Murphy now faces two formidable Smoky Mountain Conference foes this week at home, the Rosman Lady Tigers (9-5) on Tuesday after the Cherokee Scout’s press time and the Swain Lady Devils (10-7) on Thursday in the Dogs’ Breast Cancer Awareness game.