The final

Our first-place finish in our pool earned us a spot in the championship game against Loogootee (pronounced lew-GO-tee, I think), a team from southeast Indiana about halfway between Indianapolis and Evansville. Loogootee is a very tall team, with two middles, one about six feet tall and the other about six-two. From watching some of their pool play, we saw that they ran most of their offense through these two, but they also had a couple of capable outside hitters. If that wasn't enough, their setting was very good and their defense was good. Hmmm. Where's the weakness? But, of course we're pretty good too.

The match began with no team scoring two points in a row until CCS scored three on a Loogootee hitting error and consecutive Faith aces. 6-4, Patriots. Loogootee put two hits together, which we answered with a Taylor kill and an ace by Lauren. Calumet started putting some distance between the two teams as Taylor was scoring on some hits and Loogootee committed a couple of errors. The lead reached six at 14-8 after a nice kill by Faith. The teams essentially traded kills for a while, but with CCS leading 19-13, we started making errors while Loogootee made kills, aces and blocks. Loogootee tied it at 21 on a Patriot hitting error and took the lead on a kill. As has happened countless times over the last two or three years, Faith took over. Kill. Kill. Block. 24-22, CCS. Not over yet. Kill by Loogootee, We muff a serve receive. Tie game. Faith put another down and Loogootee missed on a kill and game 1 went to Calumet, 26-24.

Game 2 was similar. Only in this game the lead never got to six. This game was more of a dink fest than game one, but both teams were putting the ball down one way or another. Rebekah put one down the line to give us a 3-0 lead. Loogootee caught us at 4. We pushed the lead up to four at 9-5 on an Ally block, and for a while we kept the lead between two and four points until a CCS hitting error and a Loogootee kill make it 15-15. Faith broke the string with a kill, but Loogootee was on a roll. They went up 19-16 on a series of kills. Behind a kill and block by Ally we got back to within one, but we seemed to be tiring. After getting out muscled at the net for a point, consecutive bad hits by CCS were the final points in a 25-21 set win for Loogootee.

Once again in game three we started out with a lead. At 7-5 Loogootee called a time-out. We then committed a service error. Loogootee answered with a service error of their own. They scored the next two on a dink kill and a spike, which we answered with a dink kill by Ally. We were slow getting the block over and Loogootee powered one down. A block, a dink kill and another big kill made it 12-9. Faith pulled us back to within two, then did it a point later with another kill. Loogootee then smashed another and the final point was a tough serve we couldn't handle. 15-11, set, match and tournament to Loogootee.

Overall, the girls played very well all day. I'm going with the excuse that we had to play in an un-air-conditioned gym all day until the final while Loogootee played in the cool gym. Or maybe Loogootee was just better than our girls today. Either way, it was a lot of fun. Tuesday we continue the IHSAA stretch of the schedule with a match at East Chicago and then this weekend we have our second eight-team tournament at Kankakee Valley. We have Merrillville, Griffith and North Judson in our pool. See you there.