Another impressive season for West Ranch girls’ volleyball came to an end on Saturday.
The Wildcats were bested by the No. 2 Murrieta Valley Nighthawks in a five-set thriller at West Ranch High School.
The Nighthawks won the CIF Division 2 second-round match, 21-25, 25-21, 25-17, 18-25, 15-9.
West Ranch nearly took its self-made momentum into the fifth before hitting a speed bump in the fourth. The Cats led 18-8 in the fourth game before the Nighthawks rallied back to close the gap.
West Ranch still took the set to force a fifth game, and even went up 4-0 in the final set. From there on, Murrieta Valley couldn’t be stopped.
The Nighthawks soared to victory on a 15-4 run to close out the match and the Cats’ season while leaning on their outside hitter Ryleigh Short. The senior outside was tough to stop in the final set where she added five of her 20-plus kills. Short pounded down back-to-back-to-back kills to end the night and push Murrieta into the CIF quarterfinals.
West Ranch could do no wrong in the first and fourth matches. The Wildcats also played great, clean volleyball in the second and third sets. For West Ranch coach Jamey Ker, it was a unique situation to tell his team not to change much as even though it lost a couple of sets, the group was playing well.
“It’s an interesting message to try and send the girls in that moment of reminding them, ‘We lost that set, but we played good.’ We’re doing the right things, and we have to just continue to kind of stay the course on those types of things, trusting that the next set, it’s probably gonna go our way if we stay the course,” Ker said. “If you just stay the course, in some cases, as long as I feel like my team’s doing the things I want them to, which they were, I knew that that was going to turn into a fourth, set four win and set five battle. Really the message was, don’t change anything, as weird as that sounds.”
The Nighthawks started slow in most of the five sets. West Ranch took early leads in four of the five sets but were chased down eventually in the middle of most of the games.
The Wildcats were led by setter Dani Clewis, who finished her junior season finale with 35 assists along with eight blocks, digs and kills.
Clewis was all over the Murrieta Valley hits, and even stuffed most of the Nighthawks’ swings every time they appeared to have a clear kill off a Wildcats over-pass.
“We had a conversation with our passers that gives them the freedom to put the ball on the net,” Ker said. “If you overcook it, we have somebody that’s going to handle it really well, and that’s an amazing threat to have to say you can be aggressive with this pass. We don’t have to be scared of putting it on the net, because either it’s perfect, and that’s what we want, or we have a setter that’s going to handle it really, really well. So that’s a cheat code that we use, and we’ll continue to use as often as possible.”
Freshman Devyn Kobe concluded her first varsity season with 21 kills and two blocks.
Cats middle blocker Valentina Rezzara played well on the net but also added four aces from the back row. The middle’s serving was a huge plus for West Ranch as Murrieta Valley had some struggles returning her tricky serve.
Murrieta Valley didn’t have any clear flaws and played like the second-seeded team in the division. Preparing for the team was a challenge as West Ranch had to respect all three pin hitters and the Nighthawks in the middle. Either way, Ker was proud of his team for playing in one of its best outings of the season, if not the best, thanks to their old motto.
“I always pride myself on the fact that I think my teams are going to be playing the best volleyball at the end of the year,” Ker said. “We an acronym, or just three initials. But J-G-C is joy, growth and competition. No matter what, when I start a new season, it’s something that I communicate with the girls. If we’re looking for anything from the season, it’s joy, growth and competition. Notice that there’s no wins. There’s no W in that.”
Murrieta Valley will now advance to the quarterfinals while West Ranch calls it a season.
“That’s definitely the best team we’ve played all season,” Ker said. “No question they’ll make a good run. We had a lot of their parents come up to us after the match and kind of give us a nod and say, ‘Hey, great job,’ because I just don’t think they expected the second round to be that hard for them. I think that they’re expecting to be in the finals, and they likely will be.”
West Ranch has a lot to look forward to with 13 of 14 Wildcats slated to return next year with one of the most prominent senior classes in program history. The team will be without its tough senior Samantha Burd.
“I never want to brush past our senior Sam Burd, I just gave her a big shout-out in our team meeting about her level of dedication, her level of passion,” Ker said. “She made it to every single practice. She was on time to every single practice. She helped set up, she helped tear down. Her two close friends who were seniors ended up not playing on the roster this year, and she could have easily phoned it in, but she didn’t. I really want to give her her flowers, because she showed up and worked just as hard, if not harder, than a good chunk of the girls on the roster.”
While the loss will still sting, West Ranch now enters the off-season ready to make another splash in 2025.
“It is also really hard not to just sit there and be pretty excited about the fact that I’m returning every starter and basically every single roster member, because 13 of the 14 girls are coming back next year,” Ker said. “It’s not just that I get to bring back the skill and nature of all of the girls that were regular starters for me, but I get to bring the entire core back, and that core that we have, of those 13 girls, are the girls that we get challenged by every day in practice. They’re the girls that made us better every day in practice, and they’re the girls that cheered their butts off on those sidelines and gave us the emotional edge that we had over a bunch of teams all year long. So the comfort of knowing that I get to build upon not only the skill of this group, but also the emotional strength of this group, is just amazing. I can’t wait for July of next year. It just can’t come soon enough, because it’s going to be a really special group. I know that they’re ready for it already now, despite the fact that the season just ended, I think that they’re ready for it to start again.”