Kama Charles is one of the Lady Barons’ back row passing specialists without whom had coach Dan Coyne said Amelia’s hitters need to start the offense.

Kama Charles is one of the Lady Barons’ back row passing specialists without whom had coach Dan Coyne said Amelia’s hitters need to start the offense.
By Chris Chaney
Sun staff

Emerging from a run of lean seasons that saw the Amelia Lady Barons go a combined 19 matches under .500 in the last three years, first-year head coach Dan Coyne and a roster stocked with upperclassmen have the ladies from Clough Pike contending for a Southern Buckeye Conference title for the first time in 30 years.

“We have seven seniors and we’re trying to build a new culture of winning,” Coyne said. “We’re on the cusp of doing something really good, I think.”

At 10-5 on the season and 4-1 in the league, the Lady Barons have already surpassed their win totals of the last three seasons with seven matches remaining (The result of Amelia’s Sept. 23 match vs. Williamsburg was not available at the time of print).

The Lady Barons’ newfound success in 2014 is directly connected to the personnel that they run out on the floor. Balanced front and back rows are equally important, Coyne explained, because everything is tied together.

“We play a particular system that funnels all of our sets to our (outside) hitters with our middles responsible for blocking,” Coyne said. “We’re lucky to have two really good outside hitters — Aly Henson and Alex Scholl.

“It all starts with our passing. We have a great libero in Elizabeth Kelly and Kama Charles is a great passer in the back row. If you don’t get a good pass, you can’t get a good set and without the set, the hitter can’t hit anything.”

Of course, that defense and back-row passing can only keep the opponents off the scoreboard for so long making Henson and Scholl impact players.

Henson is currently third in Southwest Ohio in kills at 198 and Scholl isn’t far behind at 115.

With stats like those, it’s easy to see why only two of their 10 wins have not been straight set affairs (both were four-set wins).

Of their five losses, the Lady Barons were swept twice while the other three losses went the full five games. One of those five-set losses came to league leaders Western Brown, the only team to take down Amelia in SBC-American play.

“We can’t take any body for granted (in conference),” Coyne warned. “New Richmond played us very tough. Goshen is very good also and Norwood was 22-1 last year and shared the league title with Western Brown.

“Western Brown is definitely a key to us if we want to win the league, but we can’t look past (those other teams).

“Western is 17-0 and 5-0 in the league, so if we stay on track, it’s going to be a very big match at the end of the year.”

Coyne stressed the importance of one game at a time, however. The Oct. 9 showdown with Western Brown can only have league title implications if his team stays focused on their goals at hand, which begins with the next match.

The Lady Barons travel to Norwood on Sept. 25 before hosting New Richmond and Goshen back-to-back.

And as if the conference slate wasn’t formidable enough, Amelia travels to West Clermont Local School District rivals Glen Este on Monday, Oct. 6 to kick off the last week of the season. At Batavia and home against Western Brown round out the schedule before the Lady Barons jump into Division I postseason action.

The seed meeting for the sectional tournament takes place on Sunday, Oct. 5 with the first postseason matches scheduled for Monday, Oct. 13.