This is “Dots,” VolleyballMag.com’s weekly look at 10 things in high school volleyball, past or present, that interest me and hopefully will interest you. Look for Dots every Tuesday until the last high school state championship this month:
• Fifteen states held championship events since our last Dots article one week ago: Alabama, Georgia, Indiana, Iowa, Kentucky, Maine, Missouri, Nebraska, North Carolina, New Hampshire, Oregon, South Carolina, Utah (large schools), Wisconsin and Wyoming.
Since the Dots column contemplates only 10 items, rather than attempt to recap EVERYTHING, here are the results I found most interesting from the week that was.
• The most interesting story in a week when more than 65 teams won state titles was a loss.
An uncommon loss.
For 21 years, Bayside Academy of Daphne, Alabama, had won its last match of the season. The Admirals, coached by Ann Schilling, started this unprecedented streak of state titles in 2A in 2002. They won six at that classification before being elevated to 3A, where they won 10 straight. In 2018, the Alabama High School Athletic Association made Bayside a 4A school. The Admirals won that year and again the next, when they were elevated, due to success, to 5A. Bayside won that classification in 2020 and in 2021, when the AHSAA told the Admirals they were going to 6A. They won that last year! For 21 years, wherever the AHSAA placed Bayside, the Admirals won! Twenty-one years!! That’s crazy!
This year, girls who were not even born when the streak began, were tasked with continuing it. The pressure must have been intense!
Bayside won its way to the 6A semifinals, and found itself facing powerhouse Mountain Brook, a team it eliminated from contention a year ago. The Admirals (46-10) dropped the first set but won the next two. They needed to win just one more to advance and were close in Games 4 and 5, but Mountain Brook got the better of them, 25-23, 15-13, before going on to win the state title the next day over Saraland, behind tournament MVP Hannah Parant, who had 35 assists, 10 kills, 10 digs and two aces.
“They fought, they never, quit, they just battled and I can’t ever get mad when we lose like that or upset because we laid it all on the line and I told them that,” Schilling told veteran volleyball writer Dennis Victory. “I’m just proud of our program and…
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