By Mike Drooger –

The average height of the girls on the Westbrook-Walnut Grove volleyball team is 5’7”.  They do have some at 5’8” and one is listed at 5”10” but some girls at 5’5” bring the average down to five-foot-seven.

If you watch them play you’d swear half of their roster is over six feet tall.  The Chargers are smooth, athletic, jump very well, and cover the floor very nicely.  They used all of those attributes and more on Tuesday night, October 4; when they ventured to Edgerton to take on the Flying Dutchmen of Edgerton Public.

When comparing teams within the conference in 2022 it’s difficult to accurately predict a winner before a match.  SW Christian will defeat Heron Lake-Okabena/Fulda but then lose to WWG.  WWG, on the other hand, will beat SW and EPS but then lose to Adrian-Ellsworth, a team both Edgerton schools defeated.  SW loses to Murray County Central but MCC lost to A/E and barely defeated Red Rock Central, a team Edgerton swept in three sets.  It’s a topsy-turvy and unpredictable volleyball conference. 

Edgerton had hopes of knocking off the Chargers on October 4, but they never could sustain great play long enough for that to happen.  Edgerton made each set’s final score closer than the previous set but in the end, WWG won in three sets on scores of 25-16, 25-21, and 27-25. 

During coach Katelyne Alderson’s postgame interview with Ross Kreun of KDWC radio, she summed up the evening’s action this way:  “Usually our third match is generally not good.  But tonight, our third match I would say was our best match.  We were actually doing a lot more.  Tonight was weird.  I don’t know how to describe it.  I felt we had really, really good moments where we would score like five, six points, but then when things went bad they went really bad—it was five or six points the other way.  You can’t play that game if you want to win games.  Every point has to have the same amount of tenacity behind it.”

Photos by Tanya O’Leary