Emmaus volleyball coach Ken Dunkle wanted to see more energy from his team during Monday night's East Penn Conference semifinals against Liberty.

The Hornets had their moments of energy lapse but took care of business, defeating Liberty in four games (25-11, 25-20, 21-25, 25-20) to move on to Wednesday's finals against top-seeded Parkland, who had little trouble dismantling Northampton with a three-game sweep (25-17, 25-17, 25-9) in Monday's nightcap.

After jumping out to a 10-0 lead in the first game, Emmaus (14-1) remained largely in control to set up another bout for a trophy against their suburban rivals.

"We really wanted to focus on energy because we beat them [Liberty] twice already this year," Dunkle said. "I thought we did that for the most part. We had a couple lulls in there. We got our heads down a little bit at times, but we fought through it."

Emmaus experienced one of those lulls in the third game as they were looking for the sweep, rattling off six straight points to take a 16-13 lead.

However, Liberty (10-5) was able to come back from that and steal the game to force a fourth set.

Emmaus came back strong in the final set and punched their ticket to Wednesday's 7pm showdown with the Trojans at Memorial Gymnasium.

"They're a tough team and well-rounded," Dunkle said of the Trojans. "They got good hitters, good setters, so it's a little harder to get them out of their system.

"Energy is going to be key again because we didn't have a lot of fight until the second set when we played them in the regular season. "

Pat Bryan had 11 kills for the Hornets, while Ethan Maurer added 10 kills. Liberty's Logan Priestas led the way for the Hurricanes with eight kills.

The Hurricanes now shift their focus to Thursday's opening round of the District 11 3A tournament, where they square up against Nazareth in the four-five matchup.

"The next step is for us to learn what we can from this loss and from teams like Parkland by watching them," said Liberty head coach Neiad Ammary. "Everybody respects us, but nobody expects us to run the table. We really have nothing to lose."