From LBPOSTSports.com: “It’s a shame,” Wilson coach Susan Pescar said after her team’s five-set loss to Loyola in the CIF-Division 1 boys’ volleyball semifinals. She wasn’t talking about the outcome, hard to swallow as it was. “That should’ve been a championship match,” she said, and we’d agree with her, with one alteration—that should have been a national championship match. You could watch high school volleyball your whole life and only see a handful of contests as tight as the one between the nationally no. 11-ranked Bruins and the no. 2 Cubs on Wednesday night. It came down Loyola’s way, but the 25-23, 21-25, 25-12, 16-25, 14-16 loss for Wilson truly could have gone either way.
The Wilson campus gym was packed to the rafters with fans of both teams, and it would be hard to imagine a louder volleyball match, with both sidelines erupting after each long rally. The fans got their money’s worth early, in a first-set slugfest that set the tone for the evening. Wilson grabbed an early four-point lead thanks to two Mike Wilder kills and some long Cubs serves, but Loyola reigned them back in at 7-5, and the two teams were never separated by more than two points again. Wilder played out of his mind, with 7 kills, and the overall intensity of the Bruins (and their crowd) seemed to rattle the Cubs, who hit a lot of balls wide and long on their way to the two-point loss.
There was a lot of panting on the court after the first frame, and it showed early in the second, as the teams got off to a 3-3 tie thanks to four service errors. Loyola even got dinged a few points later for a rotation error, something you won’t often see from a serious national title contender. The Bruins had a slim lead for the first half, exploiting some more Cubs misses and getting their block going as well—Jake MacRae stepped up for the Bruins in the second set, with three of his ten kills. But when the Cubs caught the Bruins at 14, they took the reins, and the Bruins were playing one-point catch-up. They pushed it to 19-20 and then just ran out of time, as the Cubs’ Steven Irvin dominated the final points from the outside. The Cubs closed on a 5-2 run and it seemed like maybe the Bruins had run out of steam.
Not so.
Click here for the full article by Mike Guardabascio…