Lancaster Mennonite turns away Mounts

Talk about home cooking.

Lancaster Mennonite’s boys volleyball team played its third home match of the season on Thursday night. And for the third time on their home court, the Blazers earned a gut-check 3-2 victory.

Mennonite’s latest five-game thriller came in a key Lancaster-Lebanon League Section Two matchup against visiting Ephrata, which came into Thursday’s clash tied for third place with the Blazers.

Mennonite snapped the tie.

Ben Lefever dished off 41 assists, Paul Peachey sparked the defense with 22 digs, and Clint Wilson (16 kills), Eli Lazor (11 kills) and Seth Harmer (3 blocks) came up big at the net for the Blazers, who earned a hard-fought 24-26, 25-19, 25-19, 1825, 15-12 victory over the Mountaineers, who put up a heck of a fight with first- and fourth-game wins, but Mennonite had the last laugh.

“Coach can’t take many more of these,” Mennonite skipper Gary Martin said, chuckling, after the Blazers’ latest escape job.

End result: Mennonite (3-2) remained in the section’s lead pack with Cocalico (3-1), Elizabethtown (3-1) and firstplace Manheim Central (5-0), who were all idle Thursday. Ephrata (2-3) dipped a game back, but is still very much in the chase, with five squads angling for four L-L playoff slots.

“We started playing with more confidence, we started swinging harder and we weren’t making as many errors,” Lefever said after Mennonite survived Ephrata. “After the fourth game we all cleared our heads. It was 2-2 and we were still in it. We still had a great chance to win it.”

“The guys are being scrappy when they need to be,” Martin said. “When we’ve had our backs up against the wall, they’ve really played well.”

Like Thursday, when Ephrata gutted out a 2624 first-game thriller, and then bounced back after Mennonite rallied for a 2-1 lead with a must-have 25-18 fourthgame win to force a fifth and deciding, first to 15 wins it all set.

Mennonite took the lead for good in the finale, 6-5, when Wilson blocked Jose Laguer-Seda’s spike attempt. Wilson’s kill gave the Blazers a 10-5 cushion, and later, Wilson and Lazor, a 6-foot-6 freshman, had spikes and Mennonite withstood the Mounts’ late rally.

“There’s a lot of good things to take away from this,” Ephrata coach Bob Witwer said, “but we also still have a lot of things to work on. We have to learn some things in practice, and then put them to use. We’re close.”

After winning the Section Two title in 2016, the Mounts had retooling seasons the last two years. They’re very much back in the race this time around, with several young players already contributing.

Against Mennonite, junior Ethan Sensenig had 21 digs and 11 kills and sophomore Jordan Buch had three blocks. Laguer-Seda (21 digs), Elias Long (3 blocks) and Connor Komancheck (33 assists, 3 aces) also came up big for Ephrata on Thursday.

But the Blazers made it 3-0 in 3-2 matches already this spring.

“It’s not always the way you want to win,” Lefever said. “But it certainly makes it interesting for everyone, doesn’t it? Every game is going to be tough because every team out there is really good.”

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