The Richmond Senior volleyball team has no problems coming out of the starting blocks in its games, it’s finishing them that has coach Wendy Wallace concerned.

The Lady Raiders held on for a 26-24, 25-23, 25-17 sweep of South View in a non-conference match Wednesday afternoon.

Richmond (7-2) rallied from a 21-18 deficit in the first game to win. The Lady Raiders took advantage of three hitting errors by the Lady Tigers and closed out the game on Michelle Brown’s ace to win 26-24.

Despite the rally from her team in the first game, Wallace was not pleased with the effort.

“We just came out flat,” Wallace said. “We gave them eight points. We had eight unforced errors in the game. We had four service errors and had four balls just hit the floor. We can’t play that way.”

The Lady Raiders appeared to heed their coach’s words in the second game as they built a 22-13 lead after Rebecca Kinsey recorded one of her team-high 11 kills. However, South View stormed back as Richmond notched three hitting errors and two service errors to allow the Lady Tigers to trim the deficit to 24-23. A South View serving error allowed the Lady Raiders to escape with the 25-23 win.

“We have been working on being more aggressive with our serves in practice, so I will take the blame for our serving mistakes,” Wallace said. “We need to finish games stronger. We need to stop letting teams get back into games when we have a big lead.”

In the third and final game of the match, the Lady Raiders outscored South View 9-4 over the middle part of the game to break a 6-all tie and take control. Brittani Hodges and Allyson Wood closed out the scoring for Richmond in the game. Hodges recorded two service aces, while Wood had two kills.

“In the third game, I think we played the best we had all match,” Wallace said. “I think we were a little intimidated in the beginning because they were blocking a lot of our shots. The team tried to hit over the blocks, before they figured out hitting around the blocks.”

Wallace hopes her team will be able keep up the momentum from the third game today against Lumberton in a Southeastern Conference match at 3 p.m. in the Raider Gymnasium.

“I think coming into the match they thought (Purnell) Swett was going to be the toughest of the week,” Wallace said. “There are no easy matches, we have to play our best each time out. We can’t give good teams any momentum.”

n In the junior varsity game, Malita Ingram had eight service points and Lauren Knotts added another seven to lead Richmond to a 25-18, 23-25, 25-20 victory over South View.