Veritas volleyball player Meaghan Holmes sets up to return a serve. Veritas went 1-2 in its home quadrangular Tuesday at the East Lawrence Recreation Center.

On a night that was special for Veritas Christian volleyball seniors Adrienne Willems, Becky Woods and Kristie Tiegreen, the Eagles had to fight to the bitter end to pull out a victory on Senior Night.

In their first two matches of its final home quadrangular at the East Lawrence Recreation Center on Tuesday, Veritas was swept by both Kansas City East and Omaha Warriors.

It looked like it would be the same story against Topeka Cair Paravel, but the team rallied to win the final two games for the program’s first ever victory over Cair Paravel.

“For these seniors, this is going on five to six years that they’ve lost to Cair Paravel, and they wanted to end off with a win against them,” Veritas coach Kyle Billings said following the team’s 2-1 victory. “They decided they weren’t going to let Cair Paravel walk all over them.”

Veritas actually had faced its first opponent, K.C. East, last weekend at a tournament in Wichita and won one game in the match.

It wasn’t much of a contest this time, however, as K.C. East posted easy victories (25-18, 25-14) over the Eagles.

“They are a very good team, and for us to stay with them we need to definitely be at the top of our game, and we really weren’t by any stretch of the imagination,” Billings said.

The Eagles also had difficulties putting up points against Omaha, losing the two games, 25-18, 25-14.

After dropping the first game to Cair Paravel, 25-19, it looked as though the seniors would be swept in front of family and friends.

But for the second and third games, the Eagles took a new approach: They had fun.

“I think we just started not caring about the score and just began playing for fun,” Tiegreen said. “I think a lot of times we get too worried about the score and get too worried about winning, when really we’re just playing volleyball to have fun.”

The Eagles won the second and third games, 25-18 and 25-19, for a victory in their last home quad of the season.

“It felt really good to finally win a match tonight,” Woods said. “We started out just really slow and took quite a while to really work out the kinks and get into the game. But once we did, I thought we played really well. It was just really nice to end on a good note.”

Fittingly, it was the senior connection of Willems, who had a team-high 35 assists, and Tiegreen, who recorded a team-best 18 kills, that scored match-point.

“Actually, I set that one way too far out, and she was falling and just barely tipped it in,” Willems said. “Right after that we both looked at each other, and we just gave each other these goofy smiles, and I was just like, ‘I don’t know how you did that, but that was awesome.'”