GARWIN — GMG volleyball found calm in the chaos on Thursday night.

The Wolverines came out on top with an energetic 3-0 sweep of East Marshall in the GMG gym in the regular-season finale at home.

GMG won 25-18, 25-23, 25-20 and improved to 15-7 overall. East Marshall fell to 6-28.

The Mustangs led 22-17 in the second set and seemed poised to even the match at one set a piece, as both teams did whatever it took to keep the ball off the floor.

“We were just talking about how we needed to stay calm in the chaos, stay disciplined to ourselves,” GMG senior Adelyn Sienknecht said. “When things get harder, in these longer rallies, we just have to try and move the ball quicker, snap the wrist harder. … Our student section helped get us excited for every point.”

The Wolverines started turning it around with kills from a variety of attackers, including Anna Mussig, Maecyn Lewis and setter Olivia Maddux.

A couple East Marshall errors set up GMG for set point and they delivered with a block that just narrowly landed in bounds for the set two victory.

“I always try to remind them of what they can do on the court, what they know how to do,” GMG head coach Justina Eggers said of the set two comeback. “They just needed to clean up the court a little bit in those scattered moments, slow it down, give yourself some higher passes, higher sets, some time to breathe so that we can send a hard ball back.”

The third set was the most evenly-matched of the night, but a Maddux dump kill and ace serve pushed GMG ahead 20-17 and provided the needed breathing room to close it out, including a pair of ace serves from Sienknecht.

Maddux, a junior, was honored for surpassing 1,000 career assists on Thursday.

“She’s just a well-rounded player,” Eggers said. “Hit, serve, pass, set, it’s amazing to have her as a ‘just-in-case’ or a backup for hitting or if they send one over for us to just attack, Olivia loves those, and she can put them down.”

East Marshall made each set close on Thursday, in part due to strong hitting from, among others, Raylee Gile, Makayla Hala and Morgan Neuroth.

“It’s one of those games where you wonder how you lose when the stats looked so good,” East Marshall head coach Jason Bowers said. “We attacked really, really well tonight. … We just made a couple key errors at key points, even if it was just sending a serve receive over or not quite being ready for a tip.

“I told them I was proud of them because this is one of those games we’ve been wanting all year to just play together as a team. And it’s good for our girls to play games like this where we’re not on the wrong side of a blowout against an NICL team … I kinda secretly love coming to these little gyms where the crowd gets loud, it’s fun. They fed off that energy all night long.”

GMG plays in the Iowa Star tournament at North Tama this weekend and then will host a postseason opener Monday against Collins-Maxwell.

“We have to go game-by-game and not look ahead,” Sienknecht said. “They put up a good fight but we were prepared for them and now we’ve got to prepare for every game like that.”