The Streator volleyball team put together key runs in the middle of the first and late in the second set of Thursday’s match against rival Ottawa at Pops Dale Gymnasium.

In the middle of both those stretches was Bulldogs senior Aubrey Jacobs.

“(Aubrey) had a phenomenal season for us last year and she’s has really stepped her game up even more this year,” Streator coach Julie Gabehart said.

Jacobs finished with a match-best 11 kills to go along with six digs and the hosts improved to 2-0 on the season with a 25-18, 25-22 victory. Ottawa fell to 0-2.

“We wanted to have less tight passes to the net so our setters could make better passes to our hitters then we had (in our season opener on Monday) against Woodland. I felt like we did a good job doing that.

“My hitting was so much better then in our first match. I think mentally I just wanted to really win tonight, and my hitting was better because of that.”

Gabehart said she felt her team played a very solid match from start to finish.

“We had a slow start in our opener against Woodland and that’s pretty typical of a first match of the season,” Gabehart said. “We talked about doing every facet of the game a little better than we did last time. We did that tonight.”

The Bulldogs led 7-2 out of the gate in the opening set, but the Pirates went on a 12-3 burst to hold a 14-10 lead. From there, with four kills from Jacobs, two more from Kinslee Sweeden, and a kill and block from Ava Gwaltney, the hosts closed out the opening set on a 14-4 rally.

“We still are working on developing our confidence,” Ottawa coach Kristina Kore said. “We have a very young team and a team with not much varsity experience, so it’s a challenge. They are establishing trust with one another on the court and with me as coach. We’ll get there for sure and we’ll find our footing.

“It’s about finding what works for us, lineup-wise and rotation-wise, and trying figure out what works best for us. Our first match against Dunlap showed us a lot of our weaknesses, especially communication and serve receive, and I thought tonight we improved in those areas. Our back line was doing what we want them to do.

“We still need to work on our setter to hitter connections, because you can’t win matches without much of an offense.”

Ottawa, behind kills from Emma Molina and Jordan Allen and a block from Belle Markey, held a 4-3 lead early in the second set. A kill from Jacobs started Streator on a seven-point run to make it 12-5. Ottawa fought back to tie the set at 21-all, but a couple of hitting miscues and an ace by Gwaltney helped close out the match.

After Jacobs on the stat sheet, Sweeden had three kills, four aces and 13 assists, Alexa Barr four kills and seven digs, and Maiya Lansford 20 digs.

Bella Knoll and Emma Molina each had two kills for Ottawa, with Meredith Waldron recording nine digs, and Ashlynn Ganiere and Kendall Biba three aces apiece.

“I said before the season that I felt one of our overall strengths is going to be our serving and we focused a lot on that in practice on Wednesday,” Gabehart said. “We worked on the things that were going to help keep Ottawa out of system and keep the ball away from their hitters. I thought we did an excellent job of executing the gameplan we had.

“I thought we did a great job of making things happen offensively when we were out of system. Not every point is going to be a simple dig, pass, swing, sometimes you have to scramble and I thought we came up with a number of points tonight because of our ability to make something out of nothing. It’s something we work on a lot and it was nice to see it translate into a match like it did tonight.”

Both squads will be back in action on Saturday at the Ottawa Invite.