Jaguars Volleyball To Face Martin County West in Class A State Quarterfinals

The 5th-ranked Jaguars volleyball team opens state tournament play on Thursday, November 6th, in a 3:00pm match against Martin County West, which is based in the southwestern Minnesota town of Sherburne. Sherburne, pop. 1,082 in 2000, sits on Interstate-90 between Worthington and Fairmont.

Martin County West comes out of Section 2A. They are one of the two unranked teams coming into the eight-team field. They defeated #16-ranked Sleepy Eye St.Mary's in the Section 2A Championship 25-18, 25-21, 25-20 last night at Gustavus Adolphus College in St.Peter.

Martin County West will bring a 24-6-1 record to the state tournament. They finished 10-0 in the Valley Conference, which lies in south central Minnesota. The Valley Conference is an 11-team league with 10 Class A teams and one Class AA team (Maple River, who finished 18-11). MCW had no common opponents with our Jaguars... even in the secondary opponents, I can't find anything common.

Noteworthy: On September 29th, the Mavericks played tough against 2nd-ranked Windom, although they were swept. Game scores were 25-18, 25-23, 25-19, in a match that was held in Sherburn.

The Martin County West Mavericks have a 6'0" sophomore hitter, Alyssa Taylor. She put up 13 kills and 5 ace blocks in their sub-section championship match over St.Clair on October 30. Other top hitters for the Mavericks are 5-foot-11 Maggie Prunty, 5-foot-9 Madison Bloomquist,

MCW beat St.Clair (18-9-2 finish) in the Sub-Section 2A-South Championship in a sweep. Back in September, MCW got by St.Clair in five games, winning game five 15-12.

It's almost Noon, I'm getting ready to upload photos and video to this post. I should have that up soon. I have roughly 220 pictures to go through from last night's section championship match, along with at least 20 video clips.

Accurate results from last night's section finals in Class A: (the MSHSL site had wrong information loaded on some of the sections)

The Section 2A result had Sleepy Eye St.Mary's defeating Gibbon-Fairfax-Winthrop! G-F-W was actually the #7-seeded team

Section 6A: Number-six ranked Ada-Borup defeated unranked Underwood 25-15,25-11,18-25,25-13. Noteworthy is that Underwood (22-8 finish) won game three after getting smoked in games 1 and 2.

Seeding results with the records for the top four teams:
1 Bethlehem Academy (22-9)
2 Windom Area (31-3)
3 B-B-E (30-1)
4 Ada-Borup (30-1)

Class A quarterfinal matches: #1 seed faces Deer River, #2 seed faces Lake of the Woods, #3 seed faces Martin County West, #4 seed faces Southwest Christian.

Random jottings on the other teams in the Class A field...Five of the top 10 ranked teams in the final A.P. poll did not make the state tournament.

Lake of the Woods defeated #10-ranked Northern Freeze by big margins (25-12,25-13,25-16) in the Section 8A championship match at the University of Minnesota-Crookston campus. Lake of the Woods is 20-7 coming into state.

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