By Jeremy Stafford -- Daily Sports Correspondent

FRONT ROYAL — Trailing by one point late in the fourth game, Warren County coach Cathy Brill called a timeout to give her girls a rest.

While Central took the timeout as an opportunity to game-plan, the Warren County girls decided to break the tension of the match by playing a game of their own.

Taylor Walton, Stephy Keller and the rest of the Wildcats huddled around a randomly selected teammate who mumbled some inaudible phrase; at the sound of the phrase, the girls danced around each other until someone else was pushed into the middle of the group and was charged with restarting the sequence.

"We like to play that before games, and in the middle of them when there are breaks, to pump us up," Walton said.

There were no winners in their miniature game, but it certainly seemed to help the Wildcats against Central, as Warren County rallied to beat the Falcons 3-2 (25-16, 18-25, 18-25, 25-20, 15-10).

But even though the game was meant to pump the Wildcats, it also seemed to clear their minds, if only for a moment, from their intense and chaotic match against the Falcons.

Refreshed, Walton came into her own as a middle hitter, racking up seven of her 11 kills following the timeout. She also amassed 18 digs and three blocks.

"She's definitely our best hitter and she's leading our team in kills," Brill said.

The entire Warren County team — which is normally satisfied with simply playing the game well, serving the ball hard, and playing solid defense — came alive as their second win of the season was within reach on Wednesday.

Because of team injuries, the Wildcats came into the match with a new starting line and a defensive mindset: don't attack the ball, just keep it in play. The result was a series of drawn-out volleys that initially favored the conservative Wildcats, who took the first game.

But as the Falcons cut down on their mistakes, and the aggressive play of Brea Hinegardner sparked the rest of the Central hitters, the Falcons rallied to take the next two games, and Brill realized that her hitters needed to match Central's intensity.

"After the second and third games, I told the girls to start hitting the ball instead of just digging it over [the net]," Brill said. "I think that was the difference in the third and fourth games."

The Wildcats answered their coach with a far more aggressive attitude than they began the match with, chasing balls deep out of bounds, blindly saving them, and fighting for precious points.

"Everybody just stepped it up," Walton said. "The passes were better and the sets were better."

Central, which remains winless, played aggressively, but suffered from several errors and miscues, especially in the first set.

"Each day at practice we're working on being aggressive," Falcons coach Allison Huckstep said. "I want them to be more aggressive, and I think they came out, coming off of an aggressive practice, they brought that [aggressiveness] in here."

Hinegardner led the Falcons with eight kills, and when she served, the team seemed to be at its best, rallying twice against the Wildcats with Hinegardner behind the service line.

Still, the Wildcats set the pace in each game, and in a short fifth game, the Wildcats dispelled any hope of a last-minute Falcon rally.

"We talked about relaxing and just having fun playing volleyball and they did that and they did well," Brill said.