A four-year force: Part 9 — Comeback stuns Spartans seniors in finale

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This article was published 20/05/2021 (1779 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The Neelin Spartans rode the high of the 2012 provincial AAAA girls volleyball championship into their final year as a group. Already one of Manitoba’s undisputed powerhouses, they added two future U Sports attackers in Stonewall’s Tori Studler and Binscarth’s Emma Ciprick. They expected nothing less than equalling the past season’s success while also trying to catch the attention of university coaches across the country. The early stages of the season certainly felt different than those previous.

Kristine Ward: “There were a lot of expectations because there was kind of this curse around teams not being able to win it back to back.”

Alison Quiring: “Grade 12 is also crazy because everyone’s planning the next year. The stakes felt really high because we were all wanting to be at our best for when people were watching.”

Amy Gordon: “That season had a little bit more pressure attached to it naturally, knowing it was a lot of our last go at it, knowing we did have that title to defend. There was definitely lots of pressure involved and it was emotional for sure, knowing we’d spent all this time together, all those hours training, practising, playing, winning, losing and going through everything together, knowing it was our last season, there was a lot of pressure attached to it.”

Kevin Neufeld: “We had some changeover in personnel. Emma Ciprick and Tori Studler both transferred to Neelin in Grade 12, both not getting a lot of real good volleyball or good situations where they were.

“Our team was a little bit different dynamic. Tara van den Ham decided not to play and Sierra just wasn’t quite at that level to play. We ended up having five Grade 11s because I knew we needed some kids for the next year so we actually had a 15-player roster.”

Jordan Hardy: “They were great players and we used them where we could and appreciated everyone who went in.”

Kristine Ward: “We got two new players, which was awesome … just adding to our game but also adding to our team dynamic, holding everybody more accountable to performing in their positions. Before we were kind of getting too comfortable. It was intense to say the least and there was a lot of pressure behind it.”

Jael Unger: “We had Tori, we had Emma and also had our Grade 11 players coming up. We had Dani (Larocque), Tessa (Burt), Courtney Bryant, we had such a large bench now. We had lots of skill and lots of players to pick from. We had more height with Tori coming in, a lot of skill from both her and Emma and we had some learning players we had to progress those Grade 11s to take over after we were done.

“We had more opportunities for different drills. Kevin accommodated to everyone. We all practised and didn’t feel we were missing out by any means on opportunities to grow our skills … it was really awesome to have more people.”

Jamie Campbell: “It was a bunch of new people. It was definitely an adjustment because we were such a tight-knit group and we spent so much time together. It was easy enough, they were a great group of people to play with.”

Alison Quiring: “I remember there being a little bit of, not controversy, but other teams talking about thinking that we were recruiting people to play on our team. That was hard to deal with because that wasn’t the case … Our team was changing, growing and we were very eye on the prize, ready to do it again.

“… My older sister was on the Crocus team that won the back-to-back varsity so we were like ‘OK, we’re going to do it. We’re going to be the next people to do that.’”

Nicole Tuininga (nee Clemons): “The Grade 12 year was quite emotionally difficult. They’re not just thinking about their high school career. Lots of them are thinking about university, college, maybe going to play in the States.

“Lots of people talking about ‘Oh yeah, you’re adding Emma and Tori, you have a couple new girls, definitely put a bigger target (on). Everybody wants to beat the top dog.”

 

While the scoreboard showed little signs of struggle — Neelin boasted a 52-3 record entering provincials later — injuries, illness and adversity played a far greater role than they had in the past three seasons combined. 

Kevin Neufeld: “It was a really up and down, we had some challenges. Emma Ciprick badly sprained her ankle in the St. Vital tournament. Jordan Hardy had mono, so they missed a lot of time.”

Jael Unger: “It was really tough. I actually suffered a back injury in September as well so I was out of commission for the rest of the season. We went to Vancouver, played a tournament there. I was practising and ended up suffering some micro-fractures in my back.

“We weren’t expecting to start off that way, that’s for sure.”

Kristine Ward: “You knew if anything happened to Amy it was ‘Who’s next in to set?’”

Paige Thomson: “I think it brought us together as a team. That was the most up and down crazy year was our Grade 12 year. The whole journey that year was overall fun. I played left side in a couple of games leading up to the final … we just had to adjust a lot that year.”

Alison Quiring: “Very tough, especially when it feels like a lot of things are out of your control. I think our advantage was our intense practices and the hours we put in but without our full roster participating in practice that definitely put us behind and lowered the quality. That impacted us long term too.”

Jamie Campbell: “Up until that point we didn’t have too, too much adversity or injuries we had to overcome.

“Having to switch players around, at least for me it wasn’t much of an adjustment.”

Kristine Ward: “It was really tough. We weren’t used to our team being injured because we’d always trained so well weights wise and in the gym making sure we were showing up.

“We weren’t used to dealing with that type of adversity.”

Alexis Jameson: “It did feel weird and it was hard with the number of people injured or sick … It was exciting to be able to play a little bit more.”

Amy Gordon: “To have people there one minute and not the next, to try to get used to a different player or different lineup, definitely hard but also important in development as athletes for all of us.

“It’s never going to be the same six people over and over again. There’s going to be adversity to overcome and I think at the end of the day that was a good learning experience for all of us to adapt and try and work with what we’ve got.”

Nicole Tuininga: “Those are such good life lessons. Obviously you want to win in the end but it’s a bigger life lesson for those girls to have to face adversity. That’s real life. I hope when my kids grow up that they don’t win every game. I hope they have to fight through those challenges because that’s only going to make them more successful in life.”

 

Setbacks aside, the Spartans cruised to win their first four tournaments, took their home Neelin Dig event and swept the Brandon High School league. They also turned heads well outside of Manitoba.

Kevin Neufeld: “One of the interesting things that year was we went to UBC’s tournament in Vancouver. They got the 32 best teams in B.C. We win our pool pretty easy, we were in our quarterfinal, I remember (UBC women’s coach) Doug Reimer three different times coming up to me saying ‘This next team’s pretty good, they’re going to give you a game.’ We win 25-15, 25-16.

“Then we get to the semi and he’s like ‘Oh, this is the number two team in B.C., this will be a really good match for you.’ We won again 15 and 16. We get to the final, he’s like ‘This is the best team, this team’s really good.’ I think we won 17 and the second set was closer, might have been 22 or something.

“What was really interesting was we played three or four teams with a player better than anyone we had, but no one’s team was even close. I would say here’s this little, wee, small Manitoba school going in and beating these big B.C. schools with 2,500 kids … winning that tournament was a big accomplishment and surprised a lot of our B.C. friends for sure.”

 

Ciprick went down with an ankle injury in the St. Vital tournament when an opponent landed under the net, and she didn’t return until the provincial run, when she split time with Jordan Hardy, playing the front-row rotations while Hardy worked the back row. Neelin still secured the No. 2 seed and a bye to the quarterfinals. It swept Dakota 2-0 (25-18, 25-15, 25-11) and thrashed Miles Macdonell 3-0 (25-15, 25-18, 25-15).

Kevin Neufeld: “The semi, for sure, wasn’t close … People that know volleyball know that’s not close.”

 

It set up the final everyone expected, a perfect rubber match of the past two years with the Mennonite Brethren Hawks. The Winnipeg squad handed Neelin its only loss in the 2011 JV gold-medal match, and the Spartans replied for the varsity crown in 2012. In the early stages, the matchup lived up to its billing.

Neelin went up 16-13 to start before three missed serves and three bad passes turned the tide and MBCI won 25-20. Neelin raced ahead 20-12 in the second before seven straight Hawks points, but fed Thomson and Quiring in the middle before Hardy served it out, 25-19.

The Spartans made an incredible comeback from 24-21 to steal the third set 26-24 and took a commanding 7-1 lead, 18 points away from a fairy-tale finish. 

Kevin Neufeld: “Angela (Diboll) calls a timeout. Whatever she said and whatever I said, we went south from that in a hurry.”

Alison Quiring: “It defilnitely felt like we were in a comfortable spot with that timeout. I remember feeling pretty good but obviously we knew better than to assume it was ours. We were feeling good, feeling comfortable, feeling confident.”

Amy Gordon: “Neufeld would have snapped us out of that feeling pretty quick. It’s not in the bag until it’s in the bag, but maybe we were a little bit more relaxed coming out of that.”

Paige Thomson: “We always had that mindset of ‘All right, next one, keep rolling, keep going with it.’ That was tough … I was playing probably the best volleyball that I’d played ever. I was rolling but we were missing a bit of our spark halfway through that game.”

Jael Unger: “It’s hard to win a game three sets in a row. You have to have that mental toughness Kevin Neufeld talks about … to keep pushing, to overcome different things in the match. I wasn’t sure, I was very hopeful but didn’t want to get ahead of myself.”

Jamie Campbell: “I was like ‘We’re starting off good, this is a good roll.’ I thought they were starting to choke and fall apart. Not that we gave up or thought ‘Game over,’ but at that point it was safe to say we were thinking we were going to come out on top. I don’t know where things went wrong after that.”

 

The Spartans passing shut down, and they committed a ton of blocking errors as the score flipped to 13-9. “We’re just too easy to play against right now,” Neufeld told his group during a timeout. “It’s a long game, 7-1, 13-9, those things don’t really matter. We got to stay in the moment here and stay in the game.”

Kristine Ward: “It was definitely at that point just trying to stay alive in the game instead of playing our volleyball and that was what was most frustrating. By the end of it we weren’t even playing our game anymore.”

Amy Gordon: “Having that lead in that situation, maybe we took our foot off the gas too soon. I don’t recall a super intense turning point or certain feeling, I just remember the feeling of them coming back and it was like trying to paddle while drowning.

“There was nothing we could do to stop it.”

 

The Hawks dug up everything hit their way and effectively served the Spartans off the court. In the blink of an eye the scoreboard read 25-20 and the floor was heavily tilted in favour of MBCI. The fifth set started with the Hawks up 4-3 before the completely broke it open and got it to 11-5, taking the final four points of the season in shocking fashion.

What went wrong?

Alison Quiring: “That is the million-dollar question … It’s so emotional and what was surprising is we normally had been fine in those emotional situations. Perhaps I know Tori had never played in that kind of a situation before. Collectively we played not amazing but I wonder if had Tori been with us the year before and had that experience, then maybe would that extra sense of calm had been the thing that put us over the edge?”

Jordan Hardy: “It was definitely disappointing. Once it started going down hill we all had it in our heads that that was it, which didn’t help.”

Nicole Tuininga: “Our serve receive was terrible. I played libero in high school and university so watching that was tough. It’s like piss and vinegar in your mouth, you don’t like it. It was super unfortunate because if you watch that game or see themselves playing, they know that wasn’t their best. That’s always devastating, knowing you lost without giving it your all. I hope those girls … took that lesson with them.”

Kevin Neufeld: “We got badly outplayed the rest of the fourth set and got beaten bad in the fifth set and we really hadn’t experienced that other than maybe one or two times in the four years, once in club when the bottom fell out. That last set and two thirds the bottom just fell out for whatever reason. As a coach you’d sure like to find it but we were a little bit short staffed and weren’t able to do anything to counteract them upping their level of play.”

Nicole Tuininga: “It’s something so unpredictable. You never know how each individual is going to handle it. Some might think ‘We got this, it’s in the bag,’ and take their foot off the gas pedal. As soon as one or two individuals to that it affects the whole team.”

Kevin Neufeld: “We were a little bit in pieces going into provincials even but still good enough to win the quarter and semi. I still would have like to play that Grade 12 final with a full healthy group. Jordan and Emma played but they were about 50 per cent each. That’s not a big excuse but makes a difference.”

Jamie Campbell: “I think there was extra pressure added onto that game because of how the past three years turned out. That was the one we really wanted to win to leave on a high note, to mark our page in history. It was definitely a tough game to lose.”

 

The final point of a 15-5 set completely uncharacteristic of anything the Spartans did in the years leading up left the group with a wide range of emotions.

Jael Unger: “In the moment it was disappointing. Watching it play out I could feel everybody’s frustration … our communication started lacking a bit and we fell apart a little bit. We felt defeated I would say.”

Jamie Campbell: “It was tough. It definitely took a while to recover from that loss just because we were all so dedicated for those four years and that’s not how you want to lose it. I don’t know where we went wrong and that score doesn’t sound like our team or what we were capable of.”

Kristine Ward: “It’s super disappointing. We just had so much adversity we were going through. I played that whole game with mono and after the game ended I took a week off because I was so sick. Ending that way really sucked and we just wish it would have been the other way around where we ended Grade 12 with that Grade 11 match.”

Alison Quiring: “It did feel wrong. It felt like that wasn’t the way it was supposed to go. I remember almost wishing we could have flipped years with MBCI. I kind of wished we won in Grade 10 and Grade 12 rather than 9 and 11 because it was so anti-climactic. Even after the fact we were like ‘We had a good season, we played really well and it’s nothing to be ashamed of. We won two provincial titles and we were in the final the other two years. Obviously a very good run but it felt like a bit of a letdown. The story doesn’t quite sound right or quite sound finished when it ends like that.”

 

Thomson thought back once more to that 2005 boys basketball final she watched her dad, Don, and the Spartans lose 81-74 to Jeanne Sauve after an incredible run.

Paige Thomson: “Jason Hargreaves was on the team that year. The quote my dad told me that Jason said always stayed with me and put me in that mentality that ‘You can’t worry about the last one, you just got to move on.’ I remember when they lost the game everybody was crying and my dad went to Jason and he has this goofy smile on his face and (Don Thomson’s) like ‘What’s up?’ ‘Look how far we came, look what we accomplished.’ I had that mentality remaining calm because no matter what we did if we won or lost that game, we did something not a lot of people could have said they accomplished.

“That’s kind of what went through my head. I knew ‘Look how far we’ve came. We were just little Grade 9 girls that could barely serve over the net and look where we are now.’”

 

TOMORROW: Looking back and ahead

 

» tfriesen@brandonsun.com

» Twitter: @thomasmfriesen

 

 

CHAPTERS

 

May 12: Grade 9

May 13: Grade 10

May 14: Varsity

May 15: Coaches

May 17: City champs

May 18: Quarterfinal

May 19: Semifinal

May 20: The final

May 21: Grade 12

May 22: Aftermath