A new streak: Skippers repeat as champions
PROVIDENCE – Even with high pressure to defend the title, the Skippers never wavered.
From 2018 to Spring 2021 North Kingstown defended their Division I state championship three seasons in a row, but that was a different group of girls. After reclaiming the championship from South Kingstown last year, they followed it up by losing just one game this entire season, finishing at 18-1.
They finalized their year of dominance by beating Coventry 3-0 on Saturday afternoon at Rhode Island College, claiming their second straight D-I championship and sixth in the last seven years.
“Every team writes their own chapter,” head coach Brian Garrepy said. “With what was done before, those kids left their own mark and their own legacy but they're on to other things in life. Each year is a new chapter. I don't care how many times we’ve been here, when you get here with the nature of it being the final match and all the chips are on the table, it's tough to overcome it.”
North Kingstown won all nine sets across their three playoff games: they 3-0’d Classical and La Salle in the quarterfinals and semifinals before doing the same against Coventry.
While the final against the Oakers was a sweep, it wasn’t the prettiest showing from the Skippers. They won the first set 25-22 but nearly allowed Coventry to come all the way back from down 16-6 as the Skippers struggled to execute a few passes. They won the second set at a more comfortable 2517 score but battled for every point in the third set until their 25-23 deciding victory.
Winning without your best stuff is what great teams do. While the Skippers allowed Coventry to hang with them, it doesn’t matter because all that counts is the final result.
“It's a grind; you have to win ugly too,” Garrepy said. “I'm telling them in that last huddle, ‘You grinded it out and it wasn't our prettiest battle, but my goodness that's what championship teams do. They can win when it's pretty and they can win when it's ugly.’”
Before the playoffs started, NK senior captain Annie Draper mentioned that the key to their playoff success would be to keep a level head and not get freaked out by the pressure. That ended up as one of the reasons why the Skippers snapped out a few mid-game funks and didn’t drop a single set.
Coventry went on a 13-6 run in the middle of the first set and won seven of eight points to take a brief 21-19 lead in the third set, but the Skippers got it back under control before it was too late both times.
“Staying calm is something that’s really important, especially with these close games,” Draper said after the win on Saturday. “It's so important to stay together as a team and stay focused. I think that really helped us.”
“After every point, the six of us on the court came together,” fellow senior Ella Maack added. “We could only control what we could do on our own side, so we talked about keeping our cool and worrying about ourselves rather than the score and what they're doing.”
Maack and Draper are two players in a loaded starting lineup that have defined this team. One impact player on Saturday, though, came off the bench: junior Ava Sardelli.
Sardelli was a driving force in the first set especially. During a 10-point run which got NK to that 16-6 lead, she had two fantastic misdirection plays. Both times it looked like she was about to block the ball straight at three Coventry players in front of the net, but instead one time she lightly tapped it over the group’s heads into an empty space and the other time she put it diagonally around them for a point. After the rough stretch in the first set where Coventry nearly came back, Sardelli recorded a kill for the final point.
“I think nerves might have gotten to us a little bit in that time but we knew what the goal was and we kind of just came out of it,” Sardelli said. “I just picked my spots. I knew what the rough patches were for them.
“The talent on this team is amazing,” she added. “It's been so fun playing at such a high level. Being on a team with all of them has made my year.”
The second set was much easier as the Skippers got hot in the second half and Draper showed off with two powerful kills in the last three points for the 25-17 win.
The third set went back and forth. The Skippers went on a run of five straight to take a 15-12 lead, but the Oakers soon responded with five straight of their own and seven of eight to take a 21-19 lead. Garrepy called timeout. In the huddle, he told his team to relax and play their own brand of volleyball.
“The emotion of the event – Saturday morning with a state championship on the line – all of a sudden you're second guessing the things that you usually do,” Garrepy said. “That was our fight in our timeouts and huddles.”
North Kingstown
responded with four straight points that included two kills by Kayleigh Garrepy to go up 23-21. The Oakers tied it at 23, but the Skippers scored the final two, claiming the championship.
“It's really special because
we as seniors aren’t doing this again,” Draper said. “This was the last one.”
Draper and Maack are joined by fellow seniors Sophia Jones, Georgia Roy and Ashtyn Novasad as the graduating class.
“They were the Covid group, the kids that came in for their first two seasons
behind masks,” Garrepy said. “I didn’t even know some of their faces until last season. This group persevered. They started in the gutter considering where we were in the world at the time and they stepped up and did a lot of great things these last two seasons.”