What began as a toss-up ended as a landslide, as Hamlin asserted itself late for a 3-1 Northeast Conference volleyball win over Roncalli Saturday afternoon at the Roncalli Gym. The visiting Chargers claimed the victory by set scores of 26-24, 23-25, 25-11 and 25-13.

“Since the first two losses we took at the beginning of the season, this was the first game that was really truly going to be challenging for us,” said Hamlin coach Ashley Heinrich. “We stack up with them, and they stack up with us, so it was, who was going to be a little grittier? Defensively, who was going to be able to stop a little bit and pick up a little bit. Obviously, I feel like we did that today.”

Still, the night began as a proverbial boxing match with both teams trading points, leads – and errors – to the tune of each squad claiming a two-point set win.

It was shaping up to be exactly the sort of bounce-back effort the host Cavaliers were looking for after a straight-sets loss to Groton earlier in the week.

“Groton was a really tough loss and we could have just rolled over and not fought back,” said Roncalli coach Leesa Ware, “but the first two sets were extremely well-battled. I thought the girls did extremely well.”

But then something changed.

Hamlin, coming off a second-set loss in which the Chargers committed no fewer than six serve errors, turned up the heat a bit, and they did it behind someone who is no stranger to the Roncalli Gym.

Addison Neuendorf, daughter of former Roncalli boys’ basketball coach and athletic director Todd Neuendorf, had four kills in the Chargers’ first six points of the stanza and four more in the final six, and the Chargers were off. Hamlin put together big runs in the final two sets to punctuate the overall victory.

“Anybody that knows Addison Neuendorf knows that in big moments, she shows up,” Heinrich said. “But she’s also a really great leader. She doesn’t just talk about it, she shows it, and she expects everybody else to perform that way. … If she can get going, and we force them to have to stop her, I mean, how many big kills did we have out of our middle, because they’re thinking it’s going to go to (Neuendorf), and then they’ve got an open net.”

Neuendorf said the key to her team’s turnaround was a matter of cleaning up the errors.

“I think we played a lot cleaner volleyball,” she said. “When we serve and pass and we’re running in-tempo sets, that helps us a ton because then we have every option open.”

Neuendorf, who described her return to Roncalli as just another opportunity to compete, said the win was an important one for the Chargers.

“It means a lot,” she said. “We dropped two early in the season and we’ve had to bounce back. This was a big challenge for us, and we know that coming in. We know how good we are, we just had to prove that to everybody else.”

In a reverse of the second set, Hamlin recorded five service aces and just one error in the final set.

“They have extremely good servers, so I felt like we had a lot of serve receive errors,” Ware said. “We just didn’t have the right answers tonight.”

“We went into (the match) with really high hopes knowing that we have the potential to beat Hamlin,” said Roncalli senior Ava Danielson. “Those first two sets went really well for us. The first one, we didn’t come out with the win, but came right back in that second set. From there it went downhill a bit because nobody was able to keep that energy up.”

Hamlin, now 6-2 after six straight victories, will host Tiospa Zina next Thursday, while Roncalli drops to 4-3 with its second consecutive loss. The Cavaliers will head to Webster next Thursday, then host Aberdeen Christian the following Monday.

“I don’t think talent was an issue as tonight,” Ware said. “Don’t get me wrong, Hamlin is a very good team. A very good team. But I think we’re a good team, too. We’ve shown that against some really tough opponents.”

Serving: Aberdeen Roncalli (Kenzie Basham 2 aces, Rylee Voeller 2, Cambry Feickert 1, Karsyn Davis 1).

Hitting: Aberdeen Roncalli (Rylee Voeller 24-33 17 kills, Davis 18-20 8 kills).

Setting: Aberdeen Roncalli (Elyana Roach 38 assists).

Digs: Aberdeen Roncalli (Feickert 19, Voeller 15).