Unbeaten Bears ready for title

These are heady days in the Central Valley gym, where the Bears are preparing for the final weeks of the volleyball season and a winner-to-state showdown with Richland on Saturday.

Adding to that push is the fact that, for the first time in school history, the team is undefeated.

“There’s a lot of pressure on us being undefeated,” senior outside hitter/defensive specialist RaSasha Montgomery said. “People are coming up to us all the time saying things like ‘Oh, it’s so cool that you’re undefeated – you’re going to go win state now, right?’ ”

The team appears to be handling that added pressure by maintaining its focus on its next goal: to take the Class 4A Regional title and punch a ticket into next week’s state tournament.

Wander through the halls of the school and you can hear team members cautioning their fellow students. “Hey, we can’t mess around – we still have to play regionals,” more than one was overheard saying.

It helps that second-year head coach Amanda Bailey has been there before.

“My last team when I was in Mississippi was undefeated going into the state tournament,” she said. “That team lost in the state finals.”

That Central Valley has the talent to be where it is has never been a question. The Bears have had lots of talented players over the years. Being talented and being a team, however, can often be two different things.

“We knew we had a lot of talent coming into the season,” Bailey said. “With girls, though, that can sometimes be more of a problem than you’d think. So we have done a lot of things to help build up our team chemistry.”

Senior defensive specialist, Kara Nitteberg, said that chemistry has been the team’s strength.

“A lot of us have been playing together since middle school,” she said. “We all know each other, and a lot of us play together on the same club team. We all trust one another and we know we can count on one another.”

It’s such a focus that the team’s workout T-shirts all carry the team motto on the back: “Individually, we are one drop, but together we are an ocean.”

The Bears have had a string of emotional wins under their collective belts in just the past week.

First, they knocked off archrival University in the Flying Cow match, 25-20, 21-25, 25-13, 25-22.

“That was so great – coming down to the last match of the regular season and we’re both undefeated,” Montgomery said. “We started out a little slow and we lost that second game, but our confidence was really high. We’ve been down in matches before and we know we can always come back and win.”

CV won a pair of matches Saturday to reach the regional final with Richland, beating Mead in four games, 26-24, 21-25, 25-23, 25-20, then sweeping past U-Hi for the second time in five days, 25-18, 25-23, 25-23.

“We had an easier time with Mead this time around than we did the first time,” the coach said. “The first time we played them we went to five sets, and this time we won in four, but we did not have our best game by any stretch. But that’s the thing about this team: We know we can find a way to win when we’re not having our best match.

“We bounced back and had a much better match with U-Hi.”

Perhaps the team’s secret weapon lies in the team’s sacrifice, Nitteberg said.

“We all have a shared sacrifice,” she said. “We all agreed at the beginning of the season that we were going to give up fried food as a team. We have a list of goals for every week, and when we meet all our goals, we get to have a day where we can eat fried food. We had one day where we called off practice and the whole team went to Buffalo Wild Wings.”

Never, ever underestimate the inspirational power of a good plate of wings.