Solid teams get production from each and every player on the court, and aren’t limited to one or two options when they are on the offensive.

Rapid City Stevens put that on display Thursday night, and served notice to their future opponents that complete team performances will be a necessity if they want to knock of the Raiders.

Senior hitter Kelsey Olson blasted seven aces, including aces on the first three points of the second game. Fellow hitter Kacey Herrmann had a whale of a night, getting seven aces, 10 kills and four blocks. Junior Karlee Huber added eight kills of her own. Not to be outdone, junior hitter Margaret McCloud had three aces of her own to go along with nine kills and two blocks.

It seemed like any player that got significant playing time against Spearfish filled up the stat sheet.

“That’s what we try to pride ourselves on, is we try not to be a one-person show. We don’t want to be the team that has one very good hitter. We want to be a team that sets the ball equally among the hitters and really is hard to pick on, because you don’t know who’s going to get the ball,” Raiders head coach Joshua Lien said.

The underdog Spartans never really exposed any cracks in Stevens’ armor to break through for the upset, as they only mustered up 39 total points in the three games and struggled with the Raider size up front, and never forced the Stevens’ setter out of their rhythm, giving that size free reign at the net.

“We were just going into this tonight saying, ‘OK, we just gotta focus, play our game’. This week we focused on hitting and we focused on serving a lot this week too, just trying to get it down,” Herrmann said.

The match was also important because it gave the Raiders a chance to work out some kinks before their huge meeting with Rapid City Central on Tuesday night for the district championship.

Early on, they had a few too many spikes go long as they tried to do a little too much. The first five points of the evening for Spearfish were a result of a Raider misfire, either from the service line or the net.

“I think we tried to play with a little more finesse than we’re able to. That’s not really our style, we’re more of a power team. I thought we didn’t necessarily have sets that we could just kill, so we were trying to be fancy with them, which is the right answer, but we were hitting them long,” Lien said. “A lot of unforced errors, so it goes a little bit on our setters, on our hitters. They need to clean it up a little bit, which they know. That’s no secret.”

But later in the same game, the Raiders showed off the firepower that has them as one of the best volleyball teams in the state. Up 16-11, Herrmann had a kill and then notched an ace, followed by a Huber kill. After two Spearfish errors that made it 21-11, Huber had another kill after a great dig from Herrmann, who followed that up with back-to-back aces. McCloud drove the dagger home, getting a kill to take the first game 25-11.

Led by Olson and Herrmann, the Raiders combined for 20 aces, while only allowing one for the Spartans.

“We served well – I mean we missed some serves, but I think the serves that were in really forced them to be out of system. Kind of high-risk, high-reward, we’re going to miss some serves but we’re going to serve some aces too. I know we’ll have to work a lot harder to win next week, because every game from here on out gets more difficult. But postseason, a wins a win, we’re going to keep moving on. If we can continue to win that serve-receive battle, if we can give our setter the ball in system, we’re going to win a lot of volleyball games. I felt like we did that tonight, so that’s what we’re going to build on,” Lien said.