Girls volleyball: Flanagan-Cornell fights top-seeded Princeville to the finish in three-set, season-ending loss

ROANOKE — As evenly matched as the Flanagan-Cornell Falcons and Princeville Princes were during Thursday’s championship match of the Class 1A Roanoke-Benson Regional, it seemed increasingly likely the outcome would boil down to which team managed to get hot at the right time as the scores of the third final set inched closer to 25.

That team, via a 19-25, 25-19, 25-22 decision, was Princeville.

The Princes (28-8) bested the Falcons (19-18) in an intense point-for-point battle, winning seven of the night’s final 11 rallies to come out ahead in a rubber set that was knotted as late as 18-18 with a trip to next week’s Brimsfield Sectional on the line.

“Everybody did what they had to do,” Flanagan-Cornell coach Joe Estes said of his fifth-seeded team’s underdog effort against sub-sectional No. 1 seed Princeville. “I was asking a bunch of younger kids to step up and play well, and they did, and the seniors as well played hard. I couldn’t have asked for any more from those guys. ...

“The third set, it was just a coin flip. Whoever got on a run last and made the fewest mistakes there after 20 was going to win.”

Kortney Harms (nine kills, nine assists, eight digs) and Grace Zimmerman (10 kills, 13 digs) put in their usual all-around strong performances to lead Flanagan-Cornell, bolstered by the likes of Raegan Montello (11 assists), Kora Edens (three ace serves), Marley Highland (two kills, two stuff blocks), Emme Wallace (three kills) and Kalynne Kindermann (10 digs, two aces).

Those efforts went a far way toward offsetting the powerful hitting game of Princeville, which featured four girls with six or more kills, led by Brooke Ladd’s 16 kills with a block, Brianna Brodie’s 10 with a block, and Bethany Urbanc’s nine kills and two blocks. In the end, however, it was the hard-hitting of Ladd in the center of the net that decided things, as she spiked down three late winners to make the score 22-20, 23-20 and 24-21 before an Urbanc spike off a Falcons blocker and to the floor ultimately ended it.

“Offense is something that we work on a lot,” Princes coach Anna Schupbach said. “I tell the girls always to not be timid and to swing away, especially when the set is there. I feel like that makes a difference in our game when we go after it. ...

“[Flanagan-Cornell] was hitting some short shots, and we were a little slow on our feet, especially at the beginning ... and they had some good servers, and we struggled in our serve-receive a little bit. But I felt like once we got dialed in, we got the job done.”

Flanagan-Cornell led for most of the opening set, and Princeville did the same in the second. The third and deciding set saw the Princes take the advantage early, Flanagan-Cornell catch them at 11-11 on a Harms kill and take brief leads on stuff blocks from Highland and Harms, and the Falcons tying things at 18-18 on a Zimmerman tip kill.

Princeville got a sideout to regain the serve and the lead and an ace from libero Greta Dwyer to retake control, setting the stage for Ladd to take over at the finish.

“She is somebody that we can count on to especially step it up at the end when we need her to,” Schupbach said of Ladd.

While the Falcons came up just short of capturing the program’s 14th regional title, it was another strong postseason run after a challenging regular season both in and out of the always-stacked Heart of Illinois Conference.

“It goes to the conference we’re in,” Estes said. “We play in a really tough conference, and that gets us ready to compete in matches like this.”