Southern Lehigh wins its sixth straight title
It was smiles all around for the Southern Lehigh girls volleyball team on Tuesday night at Catasauqua High School.
That was even before the Spartans’ Colonial League finals match against Notre Dame-Green Pond. When the night was over, the smiles were even bigger and were accompanied by gold medals around their necks as the Spartans downed the Crusaders 3-0 to win league gold.
“We always play best when we have fun,” Southern Lehigh junior TrinitySky Hunte said. “When we have fun, we communicate better and the more we communicate the better we are on the court, and we play aggressively.”
In the opening set, Notre Dame was unable to match the aggressiveness of Southern Lehigh and when the Spartans broke serve to go up 2-1, they never looked back and finished the set quickly with a 25-11 win.
If Southern Lehigh thought the rest of the night would be that easy, the Spartans were wrong. The Crusaders were just getting warmed up. Notre Dame rattled off six straight points with Denali Cintron serving.
With Notre Dame up 6-1, Southern Lehigh started to chip away and tied the game at 8-8. The teams went back-and-forth from there and would have six other ties in the set before Southern Lehigh pulled ahead for good at 19-18.
Alexis Hoyer had a kill to put Southern Lehigh up 23-20 and then the Notre Dame bench was given a red card for arguing a call to give the Spartans a point that made it 24-20. Southern Lehigh then put the set away to go up 2-0.
“I always get a little nervous playing Notre Dame because they are our biggest competitor,” Hoyer admitted. “Sometimes after we win the first set, I feel like in the second set we kind of think ‘we have this,’ but then we pull ourselves together and tonight we got on a run and came all the way back.”
The third set seesawed back and forth from the beginning with both teams having to battle back. Notre Dame got a block from Analia Claros to tie the set 10-10 before Southern Lehigh broke serve and went on a run with sophomore Natalie Pristas serving and Hoyer taking over play at the net. When the run was finally broken, the Spartans were up 21-10 and Hoyer had added two kills and two blocks to her stat line with Hunte also picking up a key block.
“We’re a great serving team. We had one match this year where we didn’t serve well, and it almost cost us against Northwestern,” coach Don West Jr. said. “We played well at the net tonight and that’s a credit to our assistant coaches that live in the district, and we have brought them in to work on specific things.”
From there, the closest the Crusaders would get was 23-15 and appropriately, Hoyer put it away to lock up the gold when she served an ace to win the set 25-15.
The win gave Southern Lehigh its sixth straight Colonial League title and moved the Spartans’ record to 17-0, completing their first undefeated season. The Spartans dropped just two sets all season, one of which was against Notre Dame.
The Crusaders are 13-4 and they heads into the District 11 2A playoffs.
“My team is full of hard workers, and they don’t give up,” Notre Dame coach Sarah Wukitch said. “We have to continue that and come out aggressively when we get into districts.”
EPC playoffs
The EPC volleyball finals will be held Thursday night at Whitehall High School. Top seed Parkland (18-0) has not lost a set all season and reached the finals with wins over Nazareth and Liberty and will face Central Catholic in the finals. The Vikettes (16-2) were the third seed and downed Emmaus before upsetting second seed Pleasant Valley 3-2 in the semifinals.