A short-handed Northampton boys volleyball team welcomed Allen into Pete Schneider Gymnasium Tuesday night and the Canaries proved to be ungracious guests as they swept the K-Kids 25-18, 25-13, 25-23.

“Allen defensively, they played very,very well. We have been struggling this season to find some kind of fire to compete. We can compete all day long in practice but the transition onto the court is just not happening,” lamented head coach Sue Arndt.

The team is dealing with some injury issues to key players. Senior captain and middle blocker Logan Berger is relegated to playing in the back row only due to a nagging shoulder injury. Fellow captain Cam Coccetti went down with a sprain on the last day of tryouts and Arndt remarked, “He can’t come back soon enough.”

If you squint hard enough, you could convince yourself that the Kids had a shot to win the match. They fell behind early in the first set prompting Arndt to use her first timeout at 8-14. Northampton got back into the match and narrowed the gap to two, 15-17, but a 4-point run by the Canaries put them in front to stay.

The K-Kids trailed 12-13 in the second set before Allen reeled off 9 points in a row to blow it wide open.

The Canaries continued the momentum into the start of the third set, jumping out to a 6-0 lead. Northampton clawed their way back and got to within 23-24 but could not stave off the sweep.

Often the reaction to a loss to an Allen team is, “Wow, what happened?”, but the Canaries are a solid squad. They are 4-1 this season and a couple of their players, Jaylen Edwards and Eduardo Munoz Lopez, would see court time even on the stronger teams in the EPC.

Blake Youwakim and Kieran Lieb led the Kids with 4 kills each. Setter Caden Dempsey had 8 assists. Youwakim had 7 digs, followed by Matthew Cramer with 6. Dempsey and Lieb both had 5 digs.

The loss drops the K-Kids to 2-2 on the season and 2-1 in the EPC.

They have a busy schedule over the next week with a road game at PM West tonight, followed by the Bobcat Invitational at Northeastern High School on Saturday and then a pair of matches against Nazareth - away on Monday and home Wednesday.