Lowell Prepared for 1st Trip to Final Week
November 18, 2019
By Dean Holzwarth
Special for Second Half
LOWELL – The Lowell volleyball team has earned a trip to the season’s final week for the first time.
A beefed-up regular-season schedule helped pave the way toward school history – last week’s program-first Regional title and a spot in Tuesday’s Division 1 Quarterfinal at Jenison against No. 3 Mattawan.
Second-year Lowell coach Jordan Drake said strengthening the schedule was a focal point after bowing out in the District Final against eventual Division 1 runner-up Rockford last season.
“That was something I looked at with my coaching staff after losing to Rockford last season,” Drake said. “What can we change in order to not be in this situation again next year? I talked with my athletic director, and I said to put us in the hardest tournaments that we could.”
The No. 2-ranked Red Arrows haven’t shied away from playing against, and beating, the top teams in the state en route to a stellar 53-3 record. Lowell has wins over seven more of the top 10 in the final Division 1 coaches poll, plus the top two ranked teams in Division 2 and No. 1 team in Division 3. The Red Arrows early this season handed Division 1 No. 1 Farmington Hills Mercy its only loss (although, it should be noted, Mercy was playing without senior hitter Jess Mruzik, who was in Egypt with the U.S. U-18 national team and was back when Mercy won a rematch with Lowell last month).
“I knew we had a good team last year, but we just weren’t battle-tested,” said Drake, whose team also won the first conference title in school history last season.
“Playing Mercy, Grand Rapids Christian, Lake Orion, Hudsonville, Lakewood and Schoolcraft that are championship-contending teams, those are the conversations that you want to be in and the matches you want to be in throughout the whole season so when you get to this point you feel like you’ve been there before. I think it’s been a huge difference-maker for our kids.”
Senior middle hitter Meghan Meyer, who’s recorded 438 kills and 74 blocks, said the improved quality of their schedule has paid dividends.
“Coach put us in tournaments where we could be exposed to those good teams more so we would be experienced and ready for when it came to moments like this,” she said. “That really showed us what we’re capable of doing.”
Lowell defeated No. 4 Hudsonville 3-1 in the Regional Final. It was a gratifying win that accomplished a season-long goal, while also avenging two of the Red Arrows' losses this fall.
“The girls were ecstatic, and winning Regionals was obviously one of the goals we had set out for ourselves this season,” Drake said. “It’s right where we want to be, and we’re taking this thing one game at a time and we’re looking forward to a great competition with Mattawan. It’s going to be another tough battle like the road we’ve had. It’s been just a grind.”
Junior outside hitter Jenna Reitsma, who leads the team with 795 kills to go along with 379 digs and 82 aces, was thrilled to pull off another program first.
“We were all just really excited, and we worked really hard to get here,” Reitsma said. “We wanted to get past that milestone, especially since our school hadn’t done it before, so it was exciting to make history and work hard together to get that win.”
The Red Arrows returned eight players this fall from a year ago. However, experience alone wasn’t going to be enough to help the team meet heightened expectations.
The intangibles also needed to be developed.
“I definitely thought we could reach this level, but it was a matter of them wanting to put the work in,” Drake said. “There was a lot of things we still had to get better at from last year, and that included taking game by game and growing from our losses against tough teams.”
Still, the five-set loss to Rockford that ended their 2018 season provided perfect motivation.
“I know when we were playing different teams we kept that loss in the back of our minds,” Meyer said. “We used that as willpower to push through. It was hard losing to them, and we remembered that. We pushed ourselves harder.”
Other key contributors for the Red Arrows include junior setter Sophie Powell (1,446 assists) and junior libero Emma Hall (476 digs).
“We have never been this far in Lowell history, but we’re just going to work our hardest,” Meyer said. “It’s going to be a good game, and I believe we’re ready.”
Dean Holzwarth covered primarily high school sports for the Grand Rapids Press and MLive for 16 years and more recently served as sports editor of the Ionia Sentinel and as a sports photojournalist for WZZM. Contact him at [email protected] with story ideas for Allegan, Kent and Ottawa counties.
PHOTOS: (Top) Lowell hitters await the serve during the St. Johns Invitational on Oct. 5, where the Red Arrows went 6-0. (Middle) Meghan Meyer (5) loads up for a kill attempt. (Click to see more from HighSchoolSportsScene.com.)
Believe it: Mercy Nets 2nd Finals Title with 'Unbelievable' Comeback
By
Paul Costanzo
Special for MHSAA.com
November 18, 2023
BATTLE CREEK – Loretta Vogel had a single word to describe Farmington Hills Mercy’s five-set victory Saturday in the Division 1 Volleyball Final: Unbelievable.
“When we played Marian, to me, that was everything for me,” the Mercy coach said of her team’s Quarterfinal win over the 2022 Division 1 champion. “We planned, we knew what we wanted to do, and we went in there and it was three games – bing, bang, boom, here we go.
“Then it’s like, ‘We’re going to Battle Creek.’ We did our scouting reports, then to get in the Finals, to be down two games, such adversity, unbelievable. I don’t know if it’s going to hit me for six months, what we accomplished. It was unbelievable.”
After dropping the first two sets, Mercy came back to defeat Grand Rapids Forest Hills Northern 13-25, 23-25, 25-21, 25-22, 15-12 at Kellogg Arena, adding a second championship to the program’s first won in 2019.
The Marlins finished the season with a 32-15-3 record and entered the postseason outside the top 10 in Division 1. With just two seniors on the roster, three sophomores in the starting lineup and a freshman as one of their leading hitters, one can start to see how Vogel arrived at “unbelievable.”
Of course, on Saturday, they didn’t play like a young, unranked team, especially after going down two sets.
“I think we were a little timid in the first set,” said Mercy junior setter Campbell Flynn, who is committed to Nebraska. “It was our first time actually being in the Finals, so we were all a little nervous. But I think we stayed composed later in the set, and also kept rallies alive.”
Flynn put on a masterclass in game management, finishing with 41 assists, but doing so much more than that.
“Campbell Flynn took over the match,” Northern coach Valerie Lurye said. “We put a lot of our gameplan to making sure (Flynn) couldn’t score, and forcing her to do things like setting other kids. And the other kids showed up. … We forced her to have to do something different, which is what we wanted to do. We did really well Set 2, then Set 3 and 4 she caught on. She’s going to Nebraska for a simple reason, and that’s because she’s able to be someone who takes over the match and understands, ‘Hey, I can’t dump the ball right now. I have other people I have to go to.’ Her movement of the ball is what really threw us off our gameplan.”
The biggest beneficiary of Campbell’s ball movement was freshman Kate Kalczynski, who finished the match with a game-high 25 kills. Five of those kills came during the fifth set.
“Kate, she played amazing today,” Flynn said. “I literally just had to set her the ball and she got kills. I’m so proud of her. She’s only a freshman, but she played a big role. I was just so beyond proud of her.”
Cree Hollier added 10 kills for Mercy, while Angie Butler – playing with a torn meniscus suffered over the summer – had seven kills and 22 digs. One of Butler’s kills came off a wild scramble late in the fourth set and gave her team a 20-18 lead. It was the first bit of distance Mercy was able to create in what had been a back-and-forth set – which the Marlins went on to win.
Vogel said her team started to play like it had nothing to lose after the first two sets, and that flurry certainly backed up that assertion.
The change in attitude and energy didn’t go unnoticed on the other side of the net.
“I would say they just really turned up their energy,” Northern senior Elana Erickson said. “The first two sets, they didn’t have a lot of energy and they couldn’t really serve and pass. They really turned it up though in the third, fourth and fifth set.”
Erickson, who will play at Western Michigan next year, finished with 22 kills and 27 digs to lead Northern (45-8-1). Kendall Hopewell added 16 kills, 11 digs and seven total blocks, while Lexie Stotenbur had 41 assists.
Jillian Collins had 24 digs for Mercy, while Flynn added 15.
PHOTOS (Top) Farmington Hills Mercy surrounds Campbell Flynn (28) in celebration Saturday at Kellogg Arena. (Middle) The Marlins’ Kate Kalczynski (2) connects on a kill attempt with Kendall Hopewell (9) and Riley Loehfelm (16) putting up a block. (Below) FHN’s Madalin Hersman (6) and Flynn meet at the net. (Photos by Hockey Weekly Action Photos.)