By Michael Cignoli (For OzarksSportsZone.com)
NIXA — When a volleyball team is loaded with talented hitters all throughout the rotation, it’s exceptionally difficult for any single kill to stand out as one of the season’s most emphatic.
But it’ll be hard to top the one Jena Medearis delivered on Tuesday evening.
The Nixa senior’s highlight-reel spike off an Ozark overpass put the exclamation point on a momentum-shifting run as Nixa cruised to a 3-0 sweep of their archrivals at Eagle Fieldhouse.
After a 25-14 victory in the first set, the Eagles fell behind early in the second but responded with a 12-3 run to take a 15-9 lead. The run’s final point was the one that defined the evening, as the Tigers inadvertently sent a Nixa serve back over the net without properly setting it.
“It was coming in that perfect place to just smack it,” Medearis said. “Once it came around the net area, you jump and then you swing as hard as you can so they don’t get the ball up. And that one was a pretty decent swing, I’d say.”
Medearis called it one of the hardest balls she’d ever hit, with the facial expressions of her teammates echoing that sentiment.
Setter Sydney Golden, no stranger to setting up such swings after setting a state record with 1,163 assists last season, covered her mouth with both hands. Fellow teammates had similar reactions, as if they could not believe what they had just seen.
Golden could not have set it up better herself.
“It obviously changes the momentum a lot,” Golden said. “A big play like that, especially an open-net swing — a 10-foot line swing — is amazing. Honestly, we rely on those plays too. When we’re on and doing those kind of plays, we rely on that to bring us up. We started super slow in the second set and we needed to start a lot better, but that obviously brought us up and we got super excited.”
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Nixa rode that momentum to a 25-15 win in the second set and completed the sweep with a 25-22 victory in a third set that neither team led by more than three points.
Medearis and fellow senior Jaycee Fixsen had 11 kills apiece to pace the Eagles, with Golden setting up many of them.
“Through the whole season of seven weeks, she’s been consistently getting better and better and better,” Fixsen said of Medearis. “It’s just amazing to see from junior year and last season to now. She’s gotten so much better. She’s worked so hard. Her and Sydney.”
Classmate Allie Billmyer added eight kills for Nixa, which improved to 14-1 and a perfect 3-0 in the Central Ozarks Conference. The Eagles avenged Saturday’s 3-0 loss to Lafayette (Wildwood), the lone blemish on a dominant year in which they’ve lost just four other sets.
“They’re just really physical across the net,” Ozark coach Adeana Brewer said. “All of those kids can contribute offensively. When you have so many options to defend, you have to just take your best guess and hope that you get your hands on the block.”
It was also Nixa’s fifth straight win in the rivalry series after winning just one game against Ozark between 2012 and 2018 and gives the Eagles a key head-to-head victory that will be extremely important for determining district playoff seeding.
“Anytime we play Ozark, there are going to be a lot of emotions involved,” Nixa coach Annie Zimmerman said. “Both teams want to beat each other so bad. Typically, you’re just going to see more high-level volleyball which is exactly what we need at this point in the season and coming off of last weekend. I was just excited to see our girls be pushed — and Ozark definitely did that — and so that was definitely good for us.”
It was also good for the Eagles to have Zimmerman back on the sidelines, as the coach missed time as she recovered from a minor surgery. Monday was her first official day back, though she stopped in to some practices last week. But she skipped the road trip Saturday to recover and ensure she’d be fully ready to go for the Ozark game and the rest of the season.
With their coach back on the bench and a rival on the schedule, it was easy for the Eagles to find their motivation.
“It was very good timing after a loss,” Medearis said. “We came together, talked about things and just really focused on each other and coming together to get that energy and use that energy to win. Because if you’re a really great team and you don’t have energy and togetherness, things can just fall apart.”
And nothing provides energy quite like an earth-shaking kill.
Zimmerman wasn’t surprised to see Medearis have that opportunity, noting the senior has made it a priority to find ways to stay involved in Nixa’s transition offense in which middle hitters can get lost in the shuffle. But Medearis has been “phenomenal” throughout the season, the coach added, and really found a way to elevate her game in recent weeks.
“She’s really doing a good job of making herself available as a hitter and staying involved in the offense,” Zimmerman said. “She’s getting lots of opportunities. She’s executing on those opportunities. She’s just super active all over the place. Plays like that overpass — where she got that opportunity to get up and take that big swing — it’s so good to see her get rewarded for all of that work that she does, leading up to that one unbelievable play.”
The win allowed Nixa to keep pace with unbeaten Carl Junction atop the Central Ozarks Conference standings. The Eagles visit Joplin on Thursday before heading to the Blue Springs South Tournament, where they will compete against several other state title hopefuls.
With Medearis at her best, the Eagles are that much harder to play against. That was certainly the case on Tuesday, as the Tigers fell to 9-4 and suffered their first conference loss (2-1).
“They were in system,” Brewer said. “I don’t feel like we served very tough — and they definitely serve tough and got us out of system. It really affected our serving. When they’re in system and they have all three attackers — very good, physical attackers — they’re going to be really hard to stop.”
Rea gan Baade had seven kills for Ozark, which will look to rebound against Neosho on Thursday.
“We have to go in with a winning mindset,” Brewer said. “I feel we played defeated from the very get-go.”
OZARK (9-4, 2-1) 14 15 22 — 0
NIXA (14-1, 3-0) 25 25 25 – 3
