SOAP LAKE — The Soap Lake Eagles (5-4) earned a dominant 3-0 win over the Oroville Hornets, extending their win streak to four straight, with the last three coming in straight sets.  

“Oroville is a very scrappy team. We just watched them last week reverse sweep Wilson Creek, so we knew that they were going to be tough,” Head Coach Erin Fletcher said. “Our goal was to come in and just put it away. We didn't necessarily do that the third set, but those first two sets we did do a good job of trying to come out and be aggressive early on, handle what we could on our side, and try to put the game away early.” 

The Eagles were determined to start fast in the first set, which they did by being the first to score five points, Fletcher said. From there, they cruised to a 25-14 set win. They continued to dominate on the court, only allowing four points by the Hornets in set two as they won that as well. However, Oroville showed they weren’t going away quietly, giving the Eagles a battle in the third set, but Soap Lake managed to pull away 25-21 to seal the three-set win at home.  

Throughout the game, the Eagles excelled at capitalizing on serving errors to build their leads in each set. This is something Fletcher feels is a strength of the team.  

“We're a very aggressive serving team, and what's been really good for us is that we're a really good serve-receive team,” Fletcher said. “Even when they were able to get some serves in, we were able to quickly end their runs because this is a game of runs, and they're all about serving. We were able to really quickly get those, get them out of their own rotation and get them moving out.” 

After earning a convincing 25-14 first set win, the Eagles battened down the hatches as they cruised to a second set win. Looking sharp out of the gate, the Eagles rarely made serving errors as they jumped out to 16-4 lead. Meanwhile, serving errors and miscues by Oroville helped the Eagles build their lead.  

From there, they continued to play with a lot of energy and earned a 25-4 set win to go up 2-0 in the game.  

Oroville showed they had plenty of fight left early in the third set, keeping the score much closer and even tying it at 7-7. However, momentum still leaned in favor of the Eagles as they repeatedly re-extended their lead to 14-7 and 17-10. 

The Hornets slowly clawed their way back into the game though, cutting the deficit to 20-18 late in the third. The two teams went back and forth but the Eagles managed to pull away 25-21. 

Another key element to their win was the Eagles' improvement defending at the net, taking a step in the right direction Tuesday night, Fletcher said.  

“It’s the first time we've seen it. We've been really emphasizing it for the past week, what our net play looks like, how to be aggressive up there, what that looks like for us because we're very little,” the coach said. “We've been really trying to work on that this week. Defense has also been a really big focus for us, I thought our littles did a good job at picking up all the things, and our bigs up the net did a great job taking care of business.” 

For what the Eagles may lack in height they make up for in the energy they play with. While observers might say they play with a fire to them, Fletcher and the Eagles say it’s about finding that "inner dawg." They’ve even started a new team tradition, handing out a chain after each game to the player that "had that dawg in them." With this win, it went to Janessa Knudsen. 

“This is a whole team that hasn't had a lot of playing experience on varsity,” Fletcher said. “This is all kids (who) are very new to the varsity game, so trying to teach them what it means to be competitive and what that looks like for us has been very important. We use this whole 'dawg of the game' thing and this finding your inner dawg, and that's where that energy comes from. I'm not going to lie, they were a little bit flat to start the game, and I said, ‘I need you find your dawg today,’ and they found it.” 

The Eagles return to action on Thursday when they host the Wilson Creek Devils at 5 p.m. As they try to keep stacking wins, Fletcher and her team are not overlooking what they believe to be another regular season test.  

“It's going to be a really tough game for us,” she said. “But it's really important for us to continue to put that forward. We really want to come out of this week five and zero. We want to continue to show everyone why we deserve to be top of the league, and we're just going to keep building on it.” 

BOX SCORE: 

ORVL: 14-4-21: 0 

SPLK: 25-25-25: 3

    The Eagles’ Marina Zubritskiy (7) sets her feet ahead of Oroville's next serve.
  

    Anastasiia Achkas (1) celebrates with her Eagles teammates after scoring a point Tuesday.
  

    The Eagles’ Lily Gonzalez (6) eyes the ball as she bumps it back into the air Tuesday.