Lady Rockets’ season ends
EBENSBURG – Their season ended last night, but it marked the end of the most successful girls volleyball season in Jefferson-Morgan history. Tuesday’s 3-0 loss to top-ranked and undefeated Northern Cambria at Central Cambria High School in the first round of the PIAA Class A playoffs marked the last time J-M’s nine seniors will play volleyball together, but it cannot dull the shine on a season that included 18 wins and only three losses.
“This is the first time we made the state playoffs, so we’re happy about that,” coach Ron Headlee said. “But we’ve never been here before and Northern Cambria has. They have a good team.”
So, while Northern Cambria heads to York for this weekend’s state championship tournament, the Rockets are left to ponder the season that was.
“We always thought that, as sophomores, these girls could become a special team and they did,’ Headlee said. “We saw the potential there. We had some height with Mabel Culp and we had good players at a lot of positions. In the end, it wasn’t enough, but these girls took us pretty far.”
The Rockets became the WPIAL’s third-best Class A team and finished their careers as Section 5-A co-champions.
“These girls gave us everything we wanted all year,” Headlee said. “We won together and we lost together. We could have folded after we lost to Frazier earlier in the season, but we didn’t. We bounced back.”
The way this match started, it looked like the Rockets were about to pull off an upset that would have shocked the rest of the PIAA field. J-M scored the first six points of the match, but the Lions were quick to recover and scored the next seven. The game teetered back and forth with six ties and five lead changes. But the last lead change gave Northern Cambria an 18-17 lead en route to a 25-18 win in the first game.
“When you have a couple of big, tall players like they have, it takes a while to adjust,” Northern Cambria coach Mike Hogan said of the beginning of the match. “Once we got our good jumpers up there, we were able to get some blocks and turned it back in our favor.”
“It took a little out of us to lose that first game,” Headlee said. “Once we got behind, we were kind of behind the eight ball the rest of the match. We were trying to catch up the rest of the way and that’s tough to do, especially against a good team like them.”
The Lions scored seven in a row to take a 10-3 lead in the second game and stretched it to 20-8 in a 25-12 win. The third game was a lot like the second, but the Rockets came back from an 11-3 deficit and got to within three points, 16-13. But the Lions had their hitting and blocking game working strong and closed out the match, 25-17.
Marissa Cameron paced J-M with 36 digs and nine service points, while Morgan Olson had 14 assists and Culp powered down nine kills.
Breanna Kochinsky led the Lions in kills and Janae Dunchack had the most blocks, but Hogan said he does not provide individual statistics in an effort to foster team unity.
“They have a nice team,” Headlee conceded. “They served really well tonight, with only a couple or three bad serves the whole match. Kochinsky is one of the best jump server I’ve seen.”
Headlee and assistant coach Lisa Olson also coached their last J-M volleyball game. Headlee will continue coaching men’s wrestling at Waynesburg University and Olson said she will focus on watching Morgan and her other two daughters play college sports.