SANTA FE SPRINGS — After jumping out to a quick two-set lead over Rim of the World in Thursday night’s CIF Southern Section Division 5 second-round match, the St. Paul High girls volleyball team clearly took its foot off the gas pedal.
The Swordsmen (23-10, 3-5), who swept their first-round opponent, Valley View, on Tuesday, came into the match against the Fighting Scots perhaps a little too confident, and after breezing through the first pair of sets, there was no question about it.
Once Rim of the World won the next two sets to force a decisive fifth, St. Paul coach John Van Deventer called his team over to the sidelines and asked a rhetorical, yet meaningful question.
“ ‘Is this when you want your season to end?,’ ” Van Deventer said. “I (then said) ‘That’s your choice, we either win or we lose.’ They chose to win.”
St. Paul responded by defeating visiting Rim of the World in five sets, 25-16, 25-20, 13-25, 14-25, 15-9.
For Van Deventer, Thursday night’s close call was something that the Swordsmen needed if they hope to make a deep run in the CIF-SS playoffs.
“It was a good gut check for them, the first round was way too easy for them, and then we took the first two (sets) today and I think they started to relax, and then when they tried getting it back it just wasn’t there until the final set,” he said. “And that’s when we told them (Rim of the World) isn’t going to win in our house.”
For the Fighting Scots (18-8, 10-0), who have won the San Andreas League for four consecutive seasons, the slow start was due to a case of the butterflies.
“They needed to take a deep breath and start playing,” Rim of the World coach Linda Pattison said. “And so they came back and got back into the game.
Third set, (St. Paul) brought their two tall girls (Hannah Tostado and Alex Diaz) to the front and they pounded the line right at us. And that’s our weak spot. They figured it out, and kudos to them.”
A big part of St. Paul’s ability to hang on and defeat Rim of the World was its ability to go back to its wheelhouse — setting up Tostado and Diaz on the outside for kills.
Coming into the match, both senior captains had combined for 629 kills this season. After the Fighting Scots went up 2-0 in the fifth, Tostado and Diaz delivered four of the seven ensuing points for the Swordsmen, who led 7-6 after a Diaz kill.
That opened things up for some of St. Paul’s other hard hitters, like 6-foot-3 outside hitter Tori Tua and junior outside hitter Daielle Mataele. Both had a pair of kills in the Swordsmen’s 8-3 run to finish the match and punch their ticket into the semifinals.
Even with the visiting crowd creating a raucous atmosphere going into the final set, Diaz believed the key to St. Paul holding off Rim of the World’s comeback was the Swordsmen’s willingness to put their egos aside and go back to the basics.
“Putting our negative attitudes to the side and just playing our game really helped us there,” Diaz said.
“We pushed together and came together and said, ‘We need to win this. This is our home,’ ” Tostado added. “We wanted to do this for our school We talked together, we worked together, and we just fought it out.”
Tostado finished with 16 kills and four blocks, Diaz added 15 kills and Tua chipped in seven kills for St. Paul.
