Be careful what you wish for?
Case High School is getting the match it has wanted for the past 12 months, and while the Cardinals enter today’s MIAA State Division III Girls’ Volleyball championship favored, they will have their work cut out for them.
Standing in the Cardinals’ way is six-time defending state champion Frontier Regional School, which has eliminated them from back-to-back state tournaments. The familiar foes will square off today at noon at Shrewsbury High School.
Two years ago, the Red Hawks defeated the Cardinals, 3-1, in the state championship match, and last year, Frontier eliminated Case, 3-2, in the state semifinals. You may think Case would be tired of meeting Frontier, but if ever there was a chance for Cardinals redemption, this year would be it.
After winning its sixth consecutive state championship last season, the Red Hawks graduated their entire starting lineup and had another handful of bench players leave for prep schools. That left the cupboard bare in terms of varsity experience for coach Sean MacDonald, and that left the expectations down a bit for a the players moving up from the junior varsity.
“We’ve never lost that much and had so little coming back,” MacDonald said. “We have no seniors and we’ve never been missing an entire class of players.”
That has made the run to the state championship that much more improbable this season. The Red Hawks finished the regular season 7-13 overall but qualified for the tournament because of the 70-percent rule. If a team plays 70 percent of its league games against teams from a higher division, it needs to win 50 percent of its games against teams in its own division to qualify. Frontier plays in the Eastern Division with all Division II schools and only played two Division III teams during the season. It went 1-1 in those games and qualified.
In years past, the path to the state championship match has been relatively easy, with little in the way of resistance, but that has not been the case this season. The Red Hawks opened the WMass tourney with a three-set win over Mohawk Trail Regional High School but has seen things get progressively more difficult since. Frontier went four sets to beat Athol High School in the quarterfinals, then needed five sets in the semifinals and finals to beat Mt. Greylock Regional High School and Lee High School. Then, in Wednesday’s state semifinal against Millbury High School, the Red Hawks again were pushed to five sets.
“I think this has been the most improbable run to the state finals,” MacDonald said. “Our 2006 championship was a little improbable because that team was young, too. But we didn’t totally wipe the slate clean and graduate everybody.”
Frontier’s three consecutive five-set matches saw the Hawks in different scenarios. Against Greylock, the Red Hawks trailed 2-1 before coming back to take the final two to advance to the WMass title match against a Lee team that Frontier held a 2-1 lead on before blowing a match point in the fourth set, and getting taken to a fifth. The win over Millbury was most impressive, as Frontier dropped the first two sets before winning the final three.
Winning all the five-setters has not been entirely surprising to MacDonald, whose team is now 6-2 on the season in five-set matches.
“I’m really impressed with how well they have kept their heads together,” MacDonald said. “When Lee forced us to five games last weekend, I wasn’t too happy but the girls were like, ‘Hey, we know how to win a fifth set. We’ve got this.’ If we can get into a fifth set with Case, I like our chances. We are not going to run out of gas, and we are battle-tested. The longer the match goes, I feel like that benefits us.”
MacDonald admitted that his team must come out stronger against Case than it did against Millbury, where he said the reason Millbury was able to take the 2-0 lead was due more to Frontier’s errors than Millbury winning points. When the Red Hawks stopped making errors, things turned in their favor. Against a team like Case, which has six seniors among its top eight, falling behind two sets to none will be too deep a hole to climb out of.
“We are not going to beat Case three sets in a row,” he admitted. “We were down in the 2-1 hole last year and climbed out, but that was a really experienced team and we barely squeaked it out. We cannot spot Case a two-set lead by any stretch. We just made too many errors against Millbury. We were handing them points. We can’t do that against Case.”
MacDonald said that Case returned most of its team from a year ago and the returnees were motivated. He said that he has heard that their whole team was hitting the weight room four days a week, two hours a day, and that senior middle-hitter Mikayla Bushell, who stands at 5-foot-6, improved her vertical jump by six inches over the summer.
“That’s like lower the net half a foot,” MacDonald exclaimed. “Case is not big but they are very quick and very athletic. They play a lot on sand. When you then switch to hardwood floors, it seems easy.”
Another thing that makes Case so difficult to play against is the ability to get kills from all over the court. Unlike Frontier, whose outside hitters have much of the kills on the season, Case is actually led in kills by its two middle-hitters, while the two outside hitters are just behind. Seniors Lauren Davidson and Bushell have 196 and 157 kills as middle-hitters, while outside-hitters Hailey Armbug (junior) and Madison Rowland (senior) have 144 and 133 on the year.
“We can’t really focus on one person because they are going to spread the ball around a lot,” MacDonald said.
Frontier is led in kills by sophomore Lauren Davenport (273) and Selayna Bathurst (191). Sophomore Hailey Orloski is next on the team with 79. Bathurst (231) and Davenport (215) also lead the team in digs, although juniors Brianna Thurber (169) and Ella Deane (161) are right there as well. Deane also leads the team with 641 assists.
Frontier is gunning for its ninth state championship and seventh in a row. The Red Hawks are 8-1 in state championship matches, winning in 2005 and 2006, and then from 2010 through 2015. The lone loss came in 2007 to North Reading High School, and the Red Hawks were eliminated in the state semifinals in 2008 and 2009. The last team to beat Frontier in the postseason was Case, which topped Frontier in the semifinals in 2009 and went on to win its most recent state title. Since then, when Cassidy Stankowski was only a freshman at Frontier (she will be graduating from college in the spring), Frontier has not lost a postseason match.
Case has had other chances, playing Frontier in the state finals in both 2010 and 2011 and losing both, which gives Frontier a four-match winning streak over the Cards. Case beat Lynnfield High School, 3-0, in the other state semifinal this week and has not been challenged in the postseason to date.
Frontier is hoping to change that, although it won’t be easy, especially against a Case team with so much revenge on its mind.