PALO ALTO — The Sacred Heart Cathedral Fightin’ Irish may have entered Tuesday night as the top seed in the CCS Open Division and the second-ranked volleyball team in all of Northern California, but they were in for a rough ride.
Taking on a St. Francis team that posed tons of matchup problems with three six-footers on the front line and exceptional strength, the Irish dropped the first two sets and faced a 10-7 deficit in the fourth before finally rallying to keep their hopes of a second straight Open Division championship alive, winning in five sets (14-25, 15-25, 25-17, 25-16, 15-11).
“I think we got a little comfortable in the first two sets and underestimated how much energy they would bring,” UCLA-bound senior outside hitter Skylar Canady said after leading the comeback with a team-high 20 kills. “We’ve been through so much adversity these past two years and we’ve dealt with situations like this. Yes, we’re down, but we know we can fight back. We just have to want it.”
Despite their WCAL championship, the Fightin’ Irish had actually lost two of three meetings with St. Francis (26-12) in the regular season, dropping the Milpitas Spikefest championship and the first of their league meetings before finally cracking the code in their regular season finale on Oct. 30. It appeared the Lancers had the upper hand again after dominating the first two sets, with Kirra Kellerman starting the match on fire and sophomore outside hitter Lauren Scheffler combining with fellow sophomore Madison Pietsch to own the second set with Kellerman on the bench.
The third set looked like a return to normalcy for Sacred Heart Cathedral (26-5), but the fourth-seeded Lancers opened the fourth with an Allison Ko ace and even led 6-2 before two Canady kills bookended a 5-1 run to tie things up. Pietsch would come through with the next kill to let the underdogs retake the lead, and Scheffler would make it 10-7 by teaming up with Soana Leaea for a block and delivering a solo kill of her own to force SHC head coach Margi Beima to call timeout.
“We had to stay patient, we had to stay tough and just keep working through it,” Beima explained. “It takes a lot of maturity to keep working through it and not roll over.”
That maturity showed right after the timeout. Another block by Leaea won a long rally for the Lancers, which they had thrived in during the first three sets, but a gentle finish by Canady tied the set at 12. She would be responsible for two of the next three points as well as the Irish took the lead, and Nora Thompson found a hole in the middle of the St. Francis defense to open up a 16-12 advantage, capping off a 9-2 run. Nunu Saulala put an end to that streak, but SHC finally took one of the long rallies on a Canady spike after one of Ashley Chan’s team-high 22 digs. That seemed to completely take the air out of the Lancer side, as the Irish would finish the set with ease. A Sophie Seljeseth spike made it 22-15, Sarah Cheng placed one in the back corner after a Thompson dig and Amaya Keiper finished the set off, marking just the second time all year the Lancers would face a fifth set after winning the first two.
None of the momentum that SHC had finished the fourth set with seemed to evaporate in the three-minute break before the final go-around. If anything, the Irish got even stronger. They took the first four points of the set and, though a Sydney Peterson ace would cut it to 6-4, Chan would deliver an ace of her own to make it 9-5. Cheng dropped one perfectly in the corner for an 11-6 lead, giving the senior setter reassurance that she’d be able to play in a section championship game once again.
“Being a senior, it puts everything into perspective,” she said. “This is my last season, and we’ve put our hearts into making it really count.”
Fittingly, Canady closed the match with one last kill from the left side to give her an even 20 after her teammates had helped open things up.
“We were trying to distribute the ball but also go to those who were on and were getting kills for us,” she said of her team’s strong play in the final three sets. “They were confused with where the ball was going. We did a good job distributing it to everyone so we weren’t so predictable. Everyone got a chance to swing, and it opened up a lot for our team.”
Mitty 3, Menlo-Atherton 2 (25-19, 21-25, 24-26, 25-17, 15-9)
The sixth-seeded Bears made a valiant effort to pull off a second straight upset, but hot starts by Mitty in the first, fourth and fifth sets proved to be the difference as the Monarchs returned to the Open Division Championship after a one-year hiatus.
Balance was the theme for Mitty (28-10) as four players reached double-digit kills, including sophomores Reagan Dryden (13) and Kendra MacDonald (16). After MacDonald dominated the fourth set, the fifth seemed to belong to Dryden, who found her niche on the left side as Menlo-Atherton (23-6) tried to avoid Julia Cabri (10 kills, six blocks) in the middle.
“We came out really strong in the fifth set,” Dryden said. “Our serving and passing increased a lot; our percentages were so much better.”
Back-to-back MacDonald kills forced M-A head coach Jairo Sierra to call timeout with his team trailing 9-4, and a Niccola Bozzini block would set up Dryden to finish off the one of the longest rallies of the night to leave her team a point away from advancing to the championship. The last of Natalie Grover’s match-high 21 kills would keep the Bears alive for a moment, but Mitty would snuff out any comeback hopes there to advance to Saturday’s title match, which will be played at Gunn at 5:30.
“We were working on being present and dealing more with what we could do than what was happening in the situation,” Mitty head coach Bret Almazan-Cezar said. “They had a lot more offense than we expected to see, and we knew we had to get on the ground and dig some balls.”
Ryan Savini had a match-high 22 digs for the Monarchs as one of the senior leaders on a largely young team.
“It’s my first time in the playoffs so I just try to have fun with it,” Dryden said.
That relaxed attitude helped the Monarchs hang tough even after losing a grueling third set in which neither team led by more than two points. Cabri would give the Monarchs a 24-23 lead, but the Bears would take the next three and the set, going ahead for good on one of Julia Kahle’s 20 blocks.
Menlo-Atherton was able to hang pound-for-pound with one of the state’s most accomplished programs, but they played from behind in all three sets they lost, and even though the Bears were able to erase deficits of as much as eight points, they would run out of gas after drawing even.
“The Catholic schools have huge benches. They’re all armed,” Sierra said. “Girls on their benches would be starting at almost any other program. You could tell the tenacity that Mitty had, and maybe we were overthinking as opposed to just sticking to the gameplan.”
