Milana Ready to Shoulder Repeat Run
By
Tom Markowski
Special for Second Half
September 29, 2015
ROMEO – Gia Milana’s pace at this stage in her life is as fast-paced as the sport she plays.
Milana, a 6-1½ outside hitter at Romeo, is one of 10 finalists for the 2015 Miss Volleyball award presented by the Michigan Interscholastic Volleyball Coaches Association. There are those who contend she’s the favorite.
Ask Milana about the award and she’s a tad reserved, deflecting the attention given to an athlete who plays a team sport who’s under strong consideration for an individual honor.
“I try not to think about it,” she said. “Volleyball is a team thing for us. I really haven’t thought about it. I don’t think about it. I’d rather win and not think about an individual award.
“It would be the biggest honor. But I’m more focused on making my team better.”
Winning. That’s what Romeo did last season. The Bulldogs won the school’s first MHSAA title, downing Novi in five sets in the Class A Final, and this season they’re off to a 22-4 start and ranked No. 7.
This year’s team is different in many respects. For one, there are just four seniors. Not only did graduation put a premium on the amount of talent coming back, but it also left an opportunity for returning players to take over leadership roles that were so important in 2014.
“Last year at this time,” Milana said, “I feel last year’s team would crush us. We have the potential. Our transitional defense is horrible. To make another run we have to have the mentality that the ball won’t hit the floor.
“If we want to make another run we have to step up our game. One or two players can’t do it. Volleyball is a team-oriented sport.”
After spending six seasons as the junior varsity coach, Stacy Williams is in her 10th as varsity head coach. Williams played the sport at Sterling Heights High School and then Macomb Community College before she got into coaching. Williams credits former Romeo coach Bruce Udvari for nudging her into the profession. And she has nothing but gratitude to her former boss.
Williams also has nothing but praise for her star player.
“She’s a leader by example,” Williams said of Milana. “She’s 100 percent committed to every play. She has some pretty amazing attacks. The cool part of the team is, offensively, we have some real strong players. And then you have Gia. Teams will focus on Gia and it helps in a sense. People are looking at her, and it opens it up for others.”
Among the “others” are juniors Jodie Kelly and Payton Klein, and seniors Erica Labaere, and Nicole Nowack.
This season the libero position, often a strength for most teams, has been a bit of question mark for Williams. She’s used as many as five or six players. Recently, according to Milana, Nowack has shown steady play in that spot.
A back injury hampered Milana’s play at the start of last season. She missed the first 20 games and said it took a while for her to get back into the flow.
This season she hasn’t missed a beat. Through the first 25 games she had 315 kills. Even so, her role is different. Before high school and in her first three high school seasons, Milana was always the younger player facing girls older than her.
“I’m the core now,” she said. “It’s a different experience being the leader. It’s been quite a transition.
“We won states. We’re expected to win it again. We’re doing good in the transition. We know we have to work harder in practice.”
Finding her future
Milana committed to University of Maryland and plans to enroll in January. She chose Maryland because of its coach, Steve Aird, who is in his second season after serving as an assistant at Penn State.
Another reason Milana chose Maryland was its campus. College Park is a rural area, and for a girl from Romeo who spent her first 12 years on a farm, it has its attractions.
“I like the rural, pretty campuses,” she said. “I didn’t want to go to a college that was in the city, like Michigan.
“Maryland was horrible (when it was a member of the Atlantic Coast Conference). Now they’re in the Big Ten and … they’re better. I want to be a part of building a program.”
Maryland is 10-6 overall and 0-2 in the Big Ten.
Tom Markowski is a columnist and directs website coverage for the State Champs! Sports Network. He previously covered primarily high school sports for the The Detroit News from 1984-2014, focusing on the Detroit area and contributing to statewide coverage of football and basketball. Contact him at [email protected] with story ideas for Oakland, Macomb and Wayne counties.
PHOTOS: (Top) Gia Milana, 14, encourages her teammates during last season's Class A MHSAA Final against Novi. (Middle) Milana connects against Temperance Bedford during the Semifinal win.
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.)