Menu
Nothing to lose: Underdog Tiger Cubs ready to take on powerful Knights
Teams like to go into the post-season on a high note, and winning the last game before tournament time is always preferable to the alternative.
Greencastle’s Tiger Cubs felt in a good position entering the North Montgomery Sectional, possessing the only winning record among the six teams and drawing a first-round bye.
Yet, when they hosted Cloverdale in the Western Indiana Conference crossover match to close out the regular season on Oct. 5, a third straight win over the inspired Clovers this season didn’t happen as planned.
That defeat was the last thing in the minds of the Tiger Cubs in the eight-day span between that loss and their first sectional match.
“Yes, the coaches were worried,” Greencastle’s Maggie Walters said of the possible effect of that loss on the sectional. “Having that to be your crossover game against a team you had beaten twice, and you can’t do it a third time, that kind of had us concerned.
“But in the locker room, Maggie Meyer told the others that we had to ‘take it for what it is, learn from it and get ready for the sectional’,” Walters added. “Her saying that really motivated the team to work hard in practice.”
Meyer is the team’s only senior and its unquestioned leader, both on and off the court. She had never won a sectional title during her Greencastle career, and the school had not won one since 2002.
Speaking on Monday morning with a raspy voice still affected by the Saturday afternoon and evening excitement, Meyer did not think the loss to Cloverdale would hurt her team.
“I was excited,” she said of her trip home following that match. “Cloverdale is a really good team, and after that loss I think we were more fired up for sectionals than if we had beaten them. They put a lot of pressure on us, and we knew that feeling of losing in five and we didn’t want that again.”
Junior hitter Jada Amis wasn’t happy at all with the Cloverdale match.
“I just wanted to forget about it and move on,” she said. “I knew we had a good chance to win the sectional. We may have thought Crawfordsville was going to be an easy match since we beat them before, but it wasn’t. We watched Lebanon, and they were a good team.”
Crawfordsville won the first set 25-23 over Greencastle, before the Tiger Cubs won the next two to take the lead. Crawfordsville came back to win the fourth set 25-22, but the Cubs captured the final set 17-15 to ice the win.
“When we were put in that situation against Crawfordsville, we knew what we had to do and we did it,” Meyer added. “This is the best thing that has ever happened to me.”
From there, it was on to battle Lebanon with 25-14 being the magic victory number for Greencastle.
The Cubs won the first two sets by that score and dropped the third 25-18 before coming back to win the fourth set by the same 25-14 margin.
“We did a really good job of shutting them down from the beginning,” Meyer said of the win over Lebanon. “Our serving, our defense and our hitting were all very good. We didn’t give them a chance to get in the game.”
Coach Walters had been critical earlier in the season of her hitters not being aggressive enough, and those valuable players — particularly Amis — stepped up at exactly the right time.
“I was more aggressive, because we knew in the last set against Cloverdale that we were tipping a lot and not spiking the ball,” she said. “We had to be aggressive in the sectional to win. It was really cool and special to win the sectional, since it doesn’t happen that much.”
So, now the task is how to beat 30-4 Northview — a volleyball powerhouse that has won nine of the last 10 Western Indiana Conference titles and beat Greencastle 3-0 in the regular season in a match that took far less clock time than most matches.
“Volleyball is momentum,” she said. That’s how we were able to beat Lebanon the first two sets — there wasn’t a shift. Northview got us the first time, but we never once had the momentum in that match.”
Meyer admits the first Northview matchup was “rough” for her team.
“It probably only lasted 35 or 40 minutes,” she recalls. “They are going to be really good, but I think we kind of have an advantage that they might be overlooking us and we want to compete with them — which is our goal.”
Regardless of the regional outcome, Walters knows the sectional win will have a big effect on her program.
“I told them ‘you know what it’s like now’,” she said. “Now you have to work this hard every season to make this something we do all the time, not just once every 15 years. I’ve never had a team to get along as well as this one has, and you can’t win if you don’t have six players on the court who all get along.”
Danville Regional volleyball schedule
10 a.m. — Danville (30-4) vs. Brebeuf Prep (26-9)
Noon — Greencastle (15-10) vs. Northview (30-4)
8 p.m. — Championship