Elizabethtown Holds Off Ephrata

When it was finally over — after five grueling sets, all the rallies, all the ups and all the downs, digs, blocks and kills — Josh McCoy was a puddle.

But he had a big smile on his face.

Elizabethtown’s powerful hitter slammed 15 kills, including three must-have spikes in crunch time, and the Bears outlasted host Ephrata 3-2 on Tuesday night in a hotly contested Lancaster-Lebanon League Section Two boys volleyball match.

Game scores were 22-25, 25-18, 25-16, 20-25 and 15-6, as Elizabethtown spotted the Mountaineers the first set, built a 2-1 lead, couldn’t slam the door in the fourth, coughed up a 4-0 lead in the fifth, but finished with a flourish to pick up the win.

“Our emotions were getting us down a little bit in the beginning,” McCoy said, “but in the end, we all banded together. Once we got to the fifth, we just wanted to run it. We knew exactly what we needed to do. We were upset with how we played before, and we just wanted to put that behind us.”

Elizabethtown (2-1 league, 3-3 overall) bolted to a 4-0 lead in the fifth on four hitting errors by the Mounts. Discombobulated, Ephrata called a timeout, and then immediately ripped off four straight points to tie it up.

That’s when the Bears punched it into overdrive.

McCoy’s block gave Elizabethtown a 6-4 lead, and his kill made it 7-4. McCoy struck again for a blistering kill and an 8-5 lead, and his spike gave Elizabethtown a 10-5 edge. Cooper Torborg’s block made it 11-5, it was 12-5 on Seth Rajnic’s ace, Torborg’s spike made it 13-6, and McCoy had two sprawling digs to set up match point for Elizabethtown, which closed it out.

“It was huge because the guys played really well under pressure,” Elizabethtown rookie coach Dave Hoffmann said. “A 2-0 hole … that would have been really hard to come back from and get a reverse sweep. So it was big for us to focus and just concentrate on the little things.”

Ephrata (1-2, 2-4) built a 1-0 lead with a grudge-match win in the opener. That set featured nine ties, and the Mounts got four kills from Austin Fries for an early lead. Fries had 13 kills in all and did plenty of damage at the net for Ephrata.

Elizabethtown tied it up behind McCoy, who had a trio of kills and an ace down the stretch in the second set. In the third, Torborg (4 blocks) had back-to-back kills to give the Bears a 22-13 lead, after McCoy had two spikes and Austin Thomas and Rajnic had consecutive kills, giving Elizabethtown a 15-11 edge.

Eli Miller dished off 29 assists for Elizabethtown.

“Our mindset was that we knew what we were doing wrong, and that we could play better,” McCoy noted. “As soon as we fixed some things, that’s when we started building on it.”

The fourth set was knotted up at 19-19 when Ephrata’s Dana Belfiore had two kills for a 22-19 lead, and Fries added a late ace as the Mounts forced a deciding fifth set. Collin Martin set up 16 assists and Grant Zook had 16 digs for Ephrata.

“When they compete well, they really compete well,” Mounts coach Bob Witwer said about his troops. “It’s frustrating, but we’ll learn from this. It’s a hard lesson because this one was winnable.”

• Next