Lee Wins in Straight Sets to Set Rematch with Frontier
WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass. -- Surianna Lee had the honor of serving match point for the Lee volleyball team in Wednesday’s Western Massachusetts Division 4 semi-final win.
And she was executed that the way she executed the Wildcats’ offense all night long.
Lee’s final serve of the night was unreturnable, and Lee High stormed into Saturday’s sectional final with a 25-14, 25-20, 25-19 win over Mount Greylock.
Second-seeded Lee advances to the Western Mass title game and a rematch with Frontier, which knocked off Turners Falls on Wednesday. Last year, Frontier earned a 3-0 win over the Wildcats in the final.
On Wednesday night, the stat sheet was pretty typical for Lee, with “quarterback” Surianna Lee recording 21 assists -- spreading the ball to five different players who had at least three kills apiece.
“Evenly distributed offense, that’s typically our forte,” Lee coach John Warner said. “That’s actually been our calling card. We always distribute the ball. I look at set dispersal after every single match and want to make sure nobody is being starved.”
Jayla Speers and Lizzy Brown each had six kills, and Bailey Thomas had five. Lee and Kyle Joyce recorded three kills apiece.
Anna Wang again dazzled defensively with 22 digs.
“Unbelievable,” Warner said. “She sprawls out on the floor on a couple of digs, and I don’t know how she gets up off the floor, to be honest with you.”
Third-seeded Mount Greylock, which split with the Wildcats in the regular season, bounced back after a rough first set to make a game of it. The Mounties got two straight points off the serve fo Alyssa Phelps to pull within three points at 22-19 in the third.
But Speers put away a point to end that run, and Lee served the last two points to dash Mount Greylock’s hopes of staying in the match.
Phelps and Caroline Hadley finished with four kills apiece, and Maddie Albert had 19 assists and three aces for the Mounties.
Mount Greylock coach Greg Geyer said the three-set loss could not diminish what the Mounties accomplished in his first year with the program.
“I loved it when we were going back and forth with them,” Geyer said. “There were some great rallies that we finished or they finished. There were a lot of earned points on both sides.
“I love these kids. I’d rather have this result with these kids than a different result with another group of kids. They work really hard. Maybe they put a little too much pressure on themselves here and there.
“One run here, one there, it could have been a different match with a little bit of momentum. But my hat’s off to Lee.”
The Wildcats know they have their work cut out against Frontier, which defeated Lee in the last three sectional title games.
“The last five times we’ve played them, we’ve beaten them twice, and they’ve beaten us three times,” Warner said. “This year when we played them, it went five sets. We had them at the switch in the fifth, and we just couldn’t finish it out.
“It’s a tremendous game. It’s really a strong, well-coached team. There are not a lot of weaknesses in their game. I’ll look at some of our film and see if we can exploit some of that, but there’s not a lot to exploit. There are certainly players you want to keep the ball away from.
“This will be our fourth year going back to Western Mass [finals]. It would be nice to get one -- to dethrone those guys.”