Foothills Falcon Kieran Read attempts to spike over Holy Trinity Knight blockers Connor Jensen (12) and Jake Yavis (3) Nov. 10 in the Foothills Athletic Council final. The Knights upset the Falcons in part due to their strong blocking. photo by Bruce Campbell

The Holy Trinity Academy Knights weren’t about to get “tooled” in their attempt to defend their Foothills Athletic Council boys’ volleyball championship.

The Knights capped off a full night of volleyball when they beat their cross-town rivals from Okotoks the Foothills Composite Falcons 16-25, 25-23 and 16-14 in the final on Nov. 10 at Foothills Composite High School.

“We worked on our blocking all week and that’s what did it for us,” said Holy Trinity Knights coach Shelley Yavis. “You can either penetrate when you block or else you can go up and be tooled — that’s when you go up with arms flat and the ball goes off your hands and out of bounds.

“We worked on not being tooled.”

Foothills appeared to be more of a sure thing than a Stanley hammer going into the finals. HTA hadn’t even won a game against the Falcons in their three previous matches in regular season play.

“We didn’t even talk about how we had done against Foothills — we came in not thinking past Notre Dame Collegiate,” said Yavis. “When we got by Notre Dame (in the semi-finals) I told them to just keep it going when we played Foothills.”

It appeared the Falcons would make quick work of the Knights because they handled HTA easily winning the first game 25-16.

HTA tied the best-of-three final by beating the Falcons in a game that had some foreshadowing. After building up a lead, the Knights barely hung on to win. The Knights had a 24-21 lead and staved off a tiebreaker winning 25-23.

In the deciding game to 15 points, the Knights had a 14-10 lead and might have been making plans to hang the championship banner when Foothills rattled off four straight points to tie the game at 14.

Yavis decided not to call a timeout as the game went into extra points.

“I didn’t want James (Falcons coach James Kay) being able to talk to his guys while they had momentum,” Yavis said. “I thought about calling a timeout and then I decided not to.”

The Knights went up 15-14 when HTA power Austin Zabel hammered a spike on the back row of the Foothills’ side of the court.  They won the championship 16-14 when a Falcon spike went just out of bounds.

“There was a little bit of panic when they tied the game at 14, but we just had to look past it and try to get the next point,” Zabel said. “Fortunately, I was able to hit the back row for the next point.”

Falcons coach James Kaye said his team lost focus during the final match, something Foothills couldn’t afford to do against a strong Holy Trinity Knights team.

The Falcons finished the regular season in first place with an 18-3 record while HTA was third at 16-5. Notre Dame finished second.

The FAC playoffs featured a full evening of volleyball. The Knights’ third-place finish meant they had to beat the Highwood Mustangs in a quarterfinal match before meeting the Notre Dame Timberwolves in the semi-final.

Foothills and Notre Dame received byes to the semi-finals because of their first and second place standings respectively. The Oilfields Drillers beat the Strathmore Spartans in one quarterfinal and faced the Foothills Falcons in the semi-final, but ended up losing a tough match 25-19, 26-24.

Driller power Colton Short said they came out flat against Foothills.

“Our last game we didn’t have much energy,” Short said. “We are capable of beating of them.”

The Drillers still have an opportunity to bring home an FAC medal, however. Oilfields and Notre Dame are expected to play for the bronze medal sometime this week.

bcampbell@okotoks.greatwest.ca

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