Battle Creek St. Philip Reaffirms its Place Atop Division 4
By
Paul Costanzo
Special for MHSAA.com
November 20, 2021
BATTLE CREEK – The state’s winningest volleyball program is back to doing what it does best – winning consecutive MHSAA Finals.
Battle Creek St. Philip won its second-straight Division 4 volleyball title Saturday, sweeping Indian River Inland Lakes 25-17, 25-12, 25-8 at Kellogg Arena.
"For me, it’s just a whole different aspect now, seeing those little girls up in the stands,” St. Philip senior Brooke Dzwik said. “That was us at one point. They’re going to be the legacy. It’s not us anymore, it’s them. To really win so that they could see means a lot.”
St. Philip now has 22 Finals titles, including a record nine straight from 2007-14. If the win a year ago in a COVID-interrupted season wasn’t enough to prove the Tigers were back, Saturday’s dominant result should more than handle that.
“Last year everyone thought that we didn’t deserve the championship,” St. Philip senior Bailey Fancher said. “This year, there was no COVID (pause), there was nothing stopping us, so we wanted to prove everyone wrong that we were made to win both last year and this year’s state championships.”
St. Philip (40-11-1) entered the postseason ranked No. 3, and defeated No. 2 Athens in the Regional Final and No. 1 Adrian Lenawee Christian in the Quarterfinal just to get to Kellogg. Getting to play the underdog was a role the Tigers relished.
“We were the underdog all last year, too,” said Dzwik, who was one of five starters who returned from last year’s team. “Part of it is the competitive nature in all of us, that we wanted to prove everyone wrong, that we shouldn’t be the underdog.”
They were not the underdog Saturday, however, playing Finals newcomer Inland Lakes, which was coming off its first Regional title since 1995.
Inland Lakes (27-11-11) didn’t seem to be fazed by the moment early on, trading blows with the reigning champions, and even responding to a 4-0 run midway through the first set with a 4-0 run of its own, tying the score at 16. But following a timeout, St. Philip rattled off eight points in a row to take control and put the first set away.
From there, it was all Tigers.
“Our hitting wasn’t as powerful today – I think they got a little nervous and frazzled as things weren’t going their way,” Inland Lakes coach Nicole Moore said. “That’s a solid team that has great hitters that we weren’t adjusting to and getting touches on. That’s been our goal the whole time, and it’s worked most of the time, but today we just weren’t able to get those touches that we needed on those big hitters.”
For the Tigers, keeping the momentum when they got it was important, as St. Philip coach Vicki Groat didn’t want Inland Lakes to build confidence during the match.
“That’s a good team, and watching them on Thursday, there was no intimidation for them,” Groat said. “They were playing relaxed, they had nothing to lose, and they were the underdogs. In this stage, if you have them down, you have to keep the momentum going, keep the pressure on until the very end. I thought we did a good job of that today.”
Dzwik led the St. Philip attack with 14 kills, but Groat was impressed with how setter Rachel Myers spread the ball around throughout the match. Maddie Hoelscher (five kills), Alexis Snyder (five kills), Alex Kersten (four kills) and Makenzee Grimm (four kills) all helped to keep Inland Lakes off balance, and not allow it to focus solely on Dzwik. Kate Doyle led the St. Philip defense with 12 digs.
Natalie Wandrie had five kills and 10 digs to lead Inland Lakes, while Ryann Clancy had 11 digs. Alyssa Byrne finished with eight assists, and Olivia Monthei had four kills.
The disappointing finish didn’t take away from the historic season for the Bulldogs, as Byrne noted, “We played volleyball as long as we could.”
“We talked about before the game, we made this visual where we have this outer ring of people – northern Michigan volleyball, we’re the only people here, right,” Moore said. “We were representing them. We were representing our conference, our region, because not a lot of northern Michigan teams make it down here. We were the smallest school and the farthest school away, and I think we had a lot of blue in the stands, so that was really cool to see.”
PHOTOS (Top) St. Philip’s Makenzee Grimm (8) gets up a block as Inland Lakes’ Olivia Monthei (6) makes a play on the ball. (Middle) The Tigers’ Brooke Dzwik (9) connects, with teammate Baily Fancher (13) nearby. (Photos by Hockey Weekly Action Photos.)
Team of the Month: Gladwin Volleyball
By
Geoff Kimmerly
MHSAA.com senior editor
November 15, 2022
Tony Wetmore hadn’t arrived yet the last time Gladwin’s varsity volleyball team won a Jack Pine Conference championship. But he had a trustworthy witness able to give a first-hand account of what his Flying G’s have been chasing over the last 40+ years.
Wetmore’s mother and junior varsity coach Jane Wetmore, then Jane Huber – played on that last league championship volleyball team. She also was the one who got her son into coaching; he started his Gladwin tenure as the freshman volleyball coach teaching a sport he admittedly didn’t know much about himself.
But Mom clearly was onto something.
Less than a decade later, Wetmore has just finished up his sixth season as Gladwin’s varsity coach – and his team has finished its first league championship season since 1978, earning the MHSAA/Applebee’s “Team of the Month” honor for October.
Gladwin has been hovering in contention much of the last decade, but this team had all the ingredients to end the drought. Start with senior outside hitter Erin Breault and senior setter Delaney Reynolds – Breault broke the school’s single-season and career kills records this season, and Reynolds broke the same records for assists. Additionally, Breault led the JPC in kills, and junior middle Lizzie Haines led the league in hitting percentage.
But that high-caliber talent also was surrounded by several contributors who helped Gladwin push past longtime nemesis Beaverton and into the top spot.
“I felt like the whole season I could split the team in half, and one team could take first in the conference and the other team could take like fourth. I just felt like we were that deep where we were good and we could practice at a pretty high level, which was really cool,” Wetmore said.
“It’s obviously linked together, the assist record breaker and the kill record breaker on the same team,” he added. “And I think the thing that really pushed us over the edge this year is we had so many different attackers that were really, really good. My outside hitter Erin broke the record, she led the league in kills. My middle hitter led the league in hitting percentage. Both of those are reflective of our ability to get the ball to our attackers, which is the setter’s main job – but our back row played really well also all season, so a super-big team effort for all of them.”
The Flying G’s were able to win the Jack Pine in large part because they became the first league opponent since 2018 to defeat annual power Beaverton – Gladwin swept the pair of matches against its rival, and those remain Beaverton’s only league defeats over the last five seasons.
The Flying G’s had been building toward this. They won their District in 2018, and then finished second in the JPC in 2019. The team was only .500 in 2020, but came back to finish 29-5 last season and 29-10 this fall.
Wetmore brought Breault, Reynolds and senior libero Delaney Conley up to varsity as sophomores that 2020 season. Breault, Reynolds and Haines earned all-region honors this season, and Wetmore was named his region’s Coach of the Year by the Michigan Interscholastic Volleyball Coaches Association. (Conley, a standout softball player, has signed to continue playing that sport at Saginaw Valley State.)
More quickly than hoped, of course, Gladwin made its season-ending exit in District play again. But the Flying G’s don’t plan on the prior good times coming to an end.
True, the seniors who will graduate are part of a class that’s been long-anticipated across all sports – another example this fall has been the football team, 12-0 and playing in a Division 5 Semifinal on Saturday.
Wetmore expects his volleyball seniors’ impact to last as younger players who watched them succeed this fall take their turns on the court with a larger idea of what’s possible.
“(It’s) just getting over the hump. Talk about our goals – every year trying to win the conference championship but we can’t get there. Every year since 2018, trying to beat Beaverton but we can’t do it. Districts, we’d won every once in a while … we won in 2011, so from 2011-15 we couldn’t get over it, but in (20)16 we got a District and then we got the next two,” Wetmore said. “When you break that barrier, it makes it easier to realize you can do things.”
Past Teams of the Month, 2022-23
September: Negaunee girls tennis - Report