“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. The third set of the match may have been Wilson’s best frame of the season—on the way to a dominant 7-1 lead, MacRae had a stuff block, Jack Brizendine served up an ace, and Wilder threw in a block too. Along the way, they got great hits from Cory Leckie, Aniefre Etim-Thomas, and Brizendine, who had three kills. Wilder shone as a leader, too—after a 4-0 run put Wilson up 15-6, the refs whistled for a floor mop. Wilder sprinted to the net, grabbed the towel and scrubbed it himself, then stuffed the towel back, working as quickly as possible so as not to disrupt his team’s momentum. Later, up 17-10 with Loyola surging a little, he altered a play with the ball in the air, calling for a set after he spotted a soft spot in the Cubs defense. He hit it, and the Bruins closed 7-2.
In the fourth, Pescar says, “We ran out of steam a bit.” After the emotional third, the wheels fell off the wagon a bit for Wilson, as Loyola cruised to the 25-16 win. The Cubs limited their service errors to just two points, a significant improvement from their earlier effort. Pescar wisely warned against just seeing the third set as a letdown for Loyola and the fourth as a letdown for her club. “I thought we both did an amazing job of taking each other out of our systems,” she said.
That set up the dramatic fifth frame. “I told them before,” Pescar said. “There’s no more anything after this—give it everything.” Unsurprisingly, the set started with Irvin and Wilder dueling at the net, as they accounted for the first five kills—the teams tied at four before Loyola pulled away, eventually building an 11-7 lead that seemed insurmountable, before a 3-0 run for Wilson. The Cubs still led 14-12 and seemed on the verge of putting it away, but two straight kills from Wilder somehow tied it at 14 apiece. A thunderous kill from Sean Cotter for the Cubs, and an ace for the final point finished the match, but attendees will likely be talking about it for a few days to come.
Leaders for Wilson were Wilder, with 23 kills, a block and 13 digs, MacRae, with 10 kills a block and an ace, Etim-Thomas with six kills and two blocks, Brandon Fuimaono (who played an outstanding match at libero) with 25 digs, Cory Leckie with 24 assists five kills an ace and 8 digs, and Louie Frost with 20 assists 6 kills and 4 digs. The Bruins’ season may not yet be over, pending the announcement of the CIF state brackets—anyone who saw the match between Loyola and Wilson would be justly outraged if the Bruins don’t make it into the tournament, but anything can happen.
In her eight seasons with Wilson, Pescar has had a lot of teams get close, but none quite so close to the championship as this year’s Bruins. “After game three I was saying, ‘It’s not over yet…but it would be really great if we could pull it off.’” They couldn’t quite—but you can’t say it wasn’t an impressive effort.