Champions again!

The Calumet Christian (yes, we're back to Calumet - I don't have to change the blog name!) Patriots defeated an old rival to win the Quentin Road/Dayspring Classic volleyball tournament yesterday, their second tournament victory of the year.

As you read, we went undefeated in our pool, finishing 8-0. The day wasn't without adventure, as you also read, with the late start we all got due to some miscommunication, and the wrong turn by Coach Carr's vehicle which caused her, Jessi Stas, Holly Schaap, and Tina Schnoor to completely miss the first set against Southside, and with some struggles against weaker teams. But the girls got the job done, which set the stage for Saturday's events.

We had already examined the bracket possibilities before the tournament started, and realized that we would face Saline, if we got there, in the semifinals. We were a little disappointed that we couldn't play them in the championship, but of course there was nothing we could do about that. We also speculated about Calvary of PA in the finals, but that turned out to be a wrong assumption.

In our first game, we played Westchester. They were in our pool and we had beaten them on Friday, 25-11, 25-14. We figured that this wouldn't be a tough game, and we were right. The girls played like they played in their first bracket game in the Calumet Invitational, like a machine. Even with a lot of substitutions in the second game, the girls rolled to a 25-4, 25-4 whitewash.

The second game was against Arthur. This was a little bit of a surprise for a couple of reasons. First, we figured Calvary of PA would win their pool, but they only finished 5-3 in pool play. So after Friday's play was over, we thought we would be playing them in the quarterfinals instead of the finals, like we might have if they won their pool. But Calvary lost to Arthur in the first round of the tournament.(Background information: Three years ago, the last year Calumet had a near-perfect team, we came up against Calvary in the finals of this tournament. Calvary had, that year, one of the best teams I've seen in the four years I have been watching most of the varsity games. Calvary beat us, I believe, 25-14, 25-16. We lost two other games the whole year, which I believe were a pool play game in Nationals against Fulton County and a late-season game against Quentin Road which had beaten easily earlier in the year. So we figured if Calvary was back, they must be really good. They weren't.) Arthur had one really good middle hitter, one good middle hitter, and then the rest of team. In game one, the girls established that they were the superior team, dominating the game 25-13. In the second game, the girls decided that this was the game in which they would lose focus. Due mostly to our errors, the girls found themselves trailing 13-9. After a little 4-2 run by Calumet, they were still trailing 15-13. Then, a kill by Faith. A block by Faith. A shanked pass by Arthur. Two consecutive aces by Rachel gave the Patriots a 18-15 lead. Then four errors by Calumet with a kill by Faith in the middle of it made it a 19-19 game. Then Taylor got a kill, Arthur made a error, an ace by Kara, a kill by Faith, a dink by Jessi and another ace by Kara gave the Patriots a 25-19 win.

As expected, Saline was up next in the semifinal. Same as the Patriots, Saline had not lost the whole tournament. For those of you not with the team last year, Saline is a very conservative team from Kentucky. They don't look like much, not at all like athletes, especially in their very long shorts and long socks, but they are very smart, very good defensively, and generally do not get flustered. They do have one girl, Sarah Mills, who is a very gifted and smart player. From what I could find on the Net, they didn't lose so much as a set last year except the one to us in the final last year. Coach noticed that Sarah did all the blocking, so she made sure to distributed the hitting across the front row.

The first game went as many do for the Patriots. They were somewhat even with Saline, but service and hitting errors kept our girls from getting a bigger lead. At 12-9, the errors were fewer, but the hitting, that the girls had been doing all game, continued. Two kills by Faith, two kills by Kara, and an ace by Jessi contributed to pushing the lead out to 18-11. Then the usual flat spot for the Patriots occurred, as Saline put down some dinks and down balls and pretty soon it was 20-16. From there it was back and forth, with Calumet making many errors between kills by Jessi and Ally, but at 22-19 the girls finished off Saline with a backrow kill by Ally, and ace by Jessi and a Saline hitting error.

The second game had the Patriots jumping out to 11-4 lead. Saline began to come back, helped a lot by errors by our girls, including a net violation and back row attack violation. It was 12-11, then 14-12. But then Jessi began a long streak of serving as Faith had several kills. Calumet scored nine straight points before a kill by Saline. Then a kill by Kara and an ace by Rachel put the Patriots into the finals.

The other semifinal was between Ridgewood and Freedom Farm. Some of the girls wanted Ridgewood; others wanted a new opponent so were cheering for Freedom Farm. Ridgewood ended up winning, beating Freedom Farm in three games. We had faced Ridgewood the weekend before, winning in three tough games. Ridgewood came out fired up to play us. Our girls came out flat. There were net violations, out of rotation violations, blocking errors, hitting errors and service errors. At one point, Ridgewood was up by six at 16-10. Ridgewood hit one into the net, Taylor put one down, Jessi got two kills and it was a two point game. But then the girls scored nine in a row, which included kills by Jessi and Faith, aces by Taylor and some hits out by Ridgewood. Ridgewood then got two on a dink by Faith that went out and a block, but Calumet got the next two with the last a kill by Faith to win game one, 25-20.

The second game began very even, with some good play by both teams. but at 11-11 the Patriots scored six in a row, mainly because of hitting errors by Ridgewood. After giving up a point, the girls then outscored Ridgewood 6-2 to give Calumet a commanding 23-14 lead. Ridgewood regrouped to score four straight before Calumet stopped the streak. At 24-18 Ridgewood called a timeout. Faith was serving. Because there was no room when there were two courts per gym, Faith hadn't jump served all day. She didn't jump serve at all during the final game to that point either, but she pulled it out for this point. And of course it was perfect and dropped in for an ace, giving Calumet the set, game and tournament championship.

After the trophies for first and second were handed out, the all-tournament team was announced. There are only six all-tournament slots at the Dayspring Classic. They announced them in reverse order of votes received. First announced was Beverly Black of Quentin Road, then Monica Schlabach of Pathway, our very own Jessi Stas, and Dominique Stegall of Ridgewood. The final player named was the MVP, and that announcement had very little to no suspense. Of course it was Faith Rohn, making it two-for-two for her in MVP tournament awards.

Tuesday is a trimatch against Schaumburg and Quentin Road at Schaumburg. Then the state regionals with their ridiculous schedule this weekend. I will post on that later this week.