BULLDOGS HAN G TOUGH IN BRONZE-MEDAL GAME
General Amherst was unbeaten heading into girls AA volleyball medal-round play
Hopes for a podium finished came to a disappointing end for the General Amherst Bulldogs on Wednesday.
The No. 3-seeded Bulldogs were unbeaten heading into medal-round play, but got swept in the semifinals and then lost a tough five-set match to the tournament’s top seed in the bronze-medal game at the OFSAA girls AA volleyball championship.
“I’m really proud of us,” said Bulldogs’ senior setter Elyssa Grondin, whose team was bounced in the quarter-finals a year ago. “We did better than we did last (year). We went undefeated throughout all of our round-robin games. Even though we got fourth, I still feel we did amazing.”
General Amherst fell 3-2 to the No. 1-ranked North Bay Widdifield Wildcats by scores of 25-14, 23-25, 25-21, 17-25 and 15-10 in the bronze-medal game. It followed a 3-0 loss to the No. 2-ranked Streetsville Tigers in semifinal play by scores of 25-21, 25-15 and 25-12. Streetsville went on to win the gold medal.
“We had a great tournament,” Bulldogs coach Jeff Miller said. “We won our pool and our only losses were to the No. 1 team and the No. 2 team.”
One of the toughest matches to get up for is the bronze-medal game, which is played just hours after a semifinal loss.
“I feel like it was really hard for us because we’re a team that works together really well and when we don’t we just fall right apart,” Bulldogs outside hitter Emery Lucier said. “Coming from a really tough loss like that really shattered our confidence.
“We talked before the game to forget what happened. We came out and did play OK, every other game, but it was pretty tough to come out like that.”
The Bulldogs were chasing for much of the match. Widdifield took the final seven points to win the first set, but General Amherst built a seven-point lead in the second set and held on.
The Bulldogs held an 11-9 lead in the third set before the Wildcats rallied, but General Amherst came back with a dominant fourth set to win by eight only to have miscues doom the team in the decisive fifth set.
“We just tried to hang in there and turn momentum,” Miller said. “We outworked them for a while and got some breaks.
“Once our defence got better, our offence got a lot smoother because of it. In the fifth (set), we just made a few more simple mistakes. We gave them more easy points in the fifth where they tightened up and didn’t give us anything.”
For Grondin, who is one of five outgoing seniors, the result left her with mixed emotions.
“Frustrating, but upsetting because it’s our last year for a lot of us,” the 18-year-old Grondin said. “It would have been great to come out with a gold or a silver or even a bronze. It just didn’t workout in our favour.”
We had a great tournament. We won our pool and our only losses were to the No. 1 team and the No. 2 team.
AAA BASKETBALL
The No. 2-ranked Kennedy Clippers settled for the silver medal on Wednesday at the OFSAA boys AAA basketball tournament in Burlington.
Kennedy, which won the boys AA title a year ago, lost in the gold-medal final by a 79-55 count to the No. 4-seeded North York Crestwood Prep Lions with Mazin Tiea scoring 22 points.
Kennedy had reached the final with a 60-42 win over the No. 3-ranked Kitchener Eastwood Barons behind 30 points from Ardell Scott-jackson.