File photo by Travis Rosenau Madison Mathiowetz attacks the ball during a regular-season home match this season. Mathiowetz finished the season with 370 kills and was unanimously chosen as the 2021 All-Journal Volleyball Player of the Year.

SLEEPY EYE — After a shortened volleyball season in 2020, Sleepy Eye St. Marys’ Madison Mathiowetz had a full season this year to show what she was capable of on the court.

Since all-around ability and athleticism prompted Knights head coach Jen Walter to move Mathiowetz from setter to hitter two years ago, Mathiowetz used the second half of the 2019 season and the abbreviated 2020 season to show a glimpse at how smart the move was.

With a full slate of matches in 2021, Mathiowetz used her senior campaign to show off exactly what she could do as a full-time hitter and finished the season with 370 kills on a hitting efficiency of .409.

Her strong season also concluded with 256 digs, 62 total blocks and another Tomahawk Conference Player of the Year honor last week.

Adding another honor to an already-full list of accomplishments, Mathiowetz was unanimously chosen by The Journal’s sports staff as the 2021 All-Journal Volleyball Player of the Year.

Mathiowetz was also the All-Journal Volleyball Player of the Year last season, and she’s also a two-time All-Journal Girls’ Basketball Player of the Year.

No matter how many awards she wins, though, she’s always looking for ways to improve.

“One thing I like to always remind myself is that no matter what, whoever you’re competing against, you’re trying to be better than yourself,” Mathiowetz said. “I’m super thankful to have received all of those awards, obviously, but reminding myself that my teammates and my coaches and all those supporters that have been backing me up all these years have played a huge part in it — and thanking them — that’s super important to me, too.”

In addition to Mathiowetz’s continued improvement in the hitting department, she also improved her serve and served at 95% while finishing with 56 aces.

“My serving this year, I thought has improved a lot,” Mathiowetz said. “I really started to work on my serving, pull out my jump serve to try to slow the other team down on offense that way. Our offense as a team got a lot faster, but I think I got a lot faster from my connection with Bella [Hoffmann] and Allie [Labat], who were my two setters. We tried to run an up-tempo offense to kind of keep us going, and I thought I swung a lot more accurately this year than I have ever before.”

That up-tempo offense helped the Knights finish the season as Tomahawk Conference champions. It also helped the team make school history by finishing the regular season unbeaten at 25-0.

The Knights won a Section 2A playoff match at home against Buffalo Lake-Hector-Stewart as the second seed to move to 26-0 on the season before No. 3-seeded BOLD swept and eliminated them from the playoffs on Nov. 1 at Sibley East High School.

Despite the tough end to the year, the historic season St. Mary’s was able to have was still special.

“It was a super special season,” Mathiowetz said. “I think we realized that kind of as we went through. Not dropping a game all year is kind of crazy, we made school history. That was super special to experience that with our teammates. I think the thing about sports is you’re playing with a group of friends or a group of teammates and you’re playing for something bigger than yourself. I think we realized we were playing for our school, we were representing something bigger than ourselves. I thought we did a great job of representing our school and playing our hearts out this season to kind of keep that record and go out with a bang in a way.”

Mathiowetz will now turn her attention to her final season of basketball at St. Mary’s, but she won’t do so without looking back on a phenomenal senior campaign on the volleyball court.

“There’s something about volleyball — I think I’ve said it before — that’s just different,” Mathiowetz said. “There’s something different about volleyball. You’re on the court with your teammates, and the celebrating, and you can get pretty excited after your teammate does something or you do something, you kind of celebrate each other and the fans are always super into it. I think that’s what I’ll miss the most is that excitement, those close volleys and such. And just the memories with your teammates, the locker room, the team bonding, the spaghetti suppers, all that stuff is just something you’ll never forget, especially since you’ll never play with that group of people again.”

Mathiowetz closed out her volleyball career with 879 kills, 890 digs, 109 blocks, 318 set assists and 107 aces in 266 sets.