Girls volleyball: Willowbrook continues record-setting season
After losing its three-point lead and facing the reality of a tie game at 22 in a winner-take-all third set, Willowbrook coach Irene Mason called her final timeout.
The Warriors, who entered Monday's Class 4A Bartlett sectional semifinal against Downers Grove North with 35 victories and were fresh off their first-ever regional title, were reminded of the drill they run in practice for the exact type of situation.
"We call it 'clutch time'," Mason said moments after Willowbrook's 25-18, 22-25, 25-22 victory. "They know what that means."
The Warriors (36-1) evidently do, and responded with kills from Calli Kenny, Kyla Ostrowski and Elle Bruschuk to outlast the Trojans (21-17) to continue their record-setting season into Wednesday's sectional final against Wheaton Warrenville South.
The Tigers defeated Glenbard West 25-10, 25-23 in Monday's second semifinal.
"I just told them, this is what we've worked for all season," Mason said. "Our confidence should be high at that point. I told them that we have no reason to look nervous or afraid; we're just going to stay aggressive and finish strong."
Seemingly whenever the Warriors needed a critical point, it was Kenny, who had 15 kills, who answered the bell.
"Big time performance; big time player," Mason said. "Every time we needed it this season in the big games - especially this - this kid comes alive. I think she likes the big moments sometimes more than the games [with lesser significance], which is great to see out of a young kid."
Perhaps more impressively, Kenny has been playing out of position from her natural setter position to help more on the outside.
"To see her step into the role that we need for our team and arise for those big moments is a big credit to her, the rest of the group and the confidence they have in her," Mason said.
Following a relatively comfortable first set victory by Willowbrook, it was DGN who was able to survive a bit of a nail-biter in the second set, despite never relinquishing the lead completely. The Trojans built as big as a five point lead at 17-12 and slowly kept the Warriors at bay, despite them coming within a point or two a handful of times down the stretch.
The Trojans took a 17-14 advantage in the third set, but it was erased by kills from Kenny and Hannah Kenny, plus an attack error. The Warriors built a 22-19 advantage, but the Trojans were able to tie it up after two attack errors and a kill from Grace Beacom to set the table for the thrilling finish.
"We talked about before the third set that we weren't going to do what we did in the second set," Kenny said. "We had to come out…even if we went down a few points, we knew what we were working for. We gave it all we had and that's how we came out on top."
"…Unfortunately, Willowbrook just sent one ball more than we're used to seeing because they stayed really scrappy," Trojans coach Mark Wasik said. "We also just missed a lot of serves, which we don't typically do. We're a pretty aggressive serving team, so that could be the risk but we usually are aggressive and can hit our serves."
The Trojans were led by Gwen Wolkow's 14 kills. Beacom had seven kills.
"We just missed too many serves," Wasik said. "Too many free points that we allowed them to side-out at a higher efficiency than I think they would've if we use would've served it [more cleanly]. It kind of caught up to us because we really have been taking teams out of system with our serves. That was one of the biggest things, I thought, was just missing serves."