In sports, teams that breeze through regular seasons can sometimes be unprepared for adversity when postseason competition gets tougher.
Case in point: South Side girls volleyball The Cyclones lost just once in 15 matches entering their Long Island championship contest against Half Hollow Hills West, and 11 of those wins came in straight sets, including the Nassau A title match against Plainedge the previous weekend.
Slow starts have been the norm for South Side, according to coach Steve Mariano, and that pattern held when the Cyclones had to rally from an early 7-1 deficit to win the first set against the Red Devils. And on Nov. 12 against Half Hollow Hills West, they again found themselves in an 18-12 hole in the opening set before recovering with a 13-2 run.
But the momentum didn’t carry over. The Colts won the second set 25-18 and the third 25-20, then put South Side’s season on the brink by jumping out to a 6-1 lead in the fourth. Mariano called a timeout to settle his team.
“Honestly, I wasn’t concerned,” he recalled. “This team has fought back from being down four, five, six points literally throughout the playoffs. Even though we won a lot of matches in three in the playoffs, a lot of those games were challenging. We were down by quite a bit, especially in the beginning.”
The Cyclones rewarded Mariano’s faith by winning the fourth set 25-18 and taking the fifth more comfortably, 15-5, to claim their first Long Island championship since 2002. Senior Amy Berenbroick finished with 46 assists for South Side, which lost to Sayville in the same game last year.
There was one more hurdle before their long-awaited return to states: the Class A Southeast Regional title match against Rye at John Jay High School in Cross River last Saturday. The Cyclones again started slowly and dropped the first set 25-13, but rebounded to outlast the Garnets 25-22 in the second.
On the 25th point, junior Lena Miller’s kill attempt was blocked by a Rye player with such force that the ball ricocheted off South Side’s Allie Fingleton and sailed back over the net into the Garnets’ side, where it wasn’t returned.
“There were some crazy points in that match,” Mariano said.
South Side jumped out to 10-4 and 17-7 leads in the third set and didn’t look back in a 25-17 win. The Cyclones held a 21-17 lead in the fourth before Rye rallied and fought off South Side’s first match point with an ace that tied the set at 24. That led to a wild sequence that eventually sealed the victory.
Senior Keira Mullaney’s two kills, along with ones by Fingleton and Miller, set up match points that Rye answered each time. With the score tied at 28, Miller notched her 11th and final kill, and sophomore Catlin Ferrari followed with one on the next volley for the win.
Ferrari has been a closer of sorts for South Side in the playoffs, also finishing off Plainedge with a powerful swing in the third set.
“It’s incredible,” Mariano said. “Not every team gets the chance to even play for a regional championship, because some teams go straight to states. Our section happened to have to play a regional this year to get in. I told the girls, ‘Don’t look at it as it not being fair; look at it as an opportunity to win a championship that other teams don’t have the opportunity to win.’ They embraced that.”
Mullaney led the team with 19 kills, Fingleton had 9, and Ferrari collected 7.
“We worked really hard in practice,” said senior libero Maeve Britt. “We know we deserved these opportunities, so we just wanted to play to our potential. And we also have such a great team chemistry on and off the court that we all work hard for each other and we trust each other.”
South Side will now travel to Harding Mazzotti Arena in Glens Falls to compete for its second state championship in program history and its first since 1993. The Cyclones will compete in pool play against Islip, Burnt Hills, and Williamsville South this Friday, with the top two teams advancing to Saturday’s championship match.
