Div. III: Archie Williams (21-6) (North Coast Section) d. The Buckley School (27-4) (Southern Section), 16-25, 25-22, 25-23, 25-23, Saturday, 1:30 p.m.

Elsa Snipes was in the stands Friday night with her Archie Williams teammates, watching Branson, the team that swept it out of the North Coast Section Division III playoffs, pull off an improbable five-set win in the CIF State Division I final. The 5-8 senior OH  cheered as her younger sister, junior OH Sadie Snipes, had a big match for the Bulls and thought to herself how excited she was for the Division III match the next day when she and her Falcon teammates would have their time to shine.

That night, Elsa Snipes admittedly was a little nervous.

“I saw that they accomplished something that I also wanted so bad and I’m a very competitive player,” Snipes said. I thought, ‘Let’s do this for the both of us. Let’s do this for our parents. Two state champions. Two different teams. Is that even heard of?’”

The next day, inspired by her sister and with Branson returning the favor by being present and cheering Archie Williams on, Snipes delivered 25 kills, 12 digs, five assists, two blocks, and an ace in pushing the Falcons past The Buckley School for the first volleyball title in school history.

“I want to tell you how proud I am of all you girls,” Archie Williams head coach Lisa Hudson said after the match. “I was a little concerned after the first set but you got all your jitters out and played your game. Your passing was amazing it enabled us to run a great offense. Most importantly was your grit and determination to keep fighting.”

***

As exciting as it was for Archie Williams to claim a state title for the history books, the match could as easily have gone the other way. Buckley, the Southern Section champs in Division 5, dominated the first set and played the next three sets close in its first finals appearance.

“The differences in the match weren’t large, “ said first-year head coach Otis Glasgow. “Our block could have been a bit more together. The variables that impacted this match were very small.”

Buckley started the match on fire. The Griffins scored immediately on a kill out of the middle from sky-walking 6-2 sophomore Sophia Wolfson, set up nicely by Charlotte Reff; and rushed to a 14-4 lead thanks to strong play in all phases. Wolfson was imposing her will in the middle, Reff was setting her up, along with outsides Adonia Anene and Tate Drageset, and also impacting the set with her blocking and serving; and libero Emma Daly was keeping Archie Williams hitters at bay.

Despite Archie Williams falling significantly behind, Hudson waited to call a timeout.

“Throughout the playoffs, we’ve been down a few times and we’ve been able to come back,” she explained. “They’ve surprised me quite a bit, so I wanted to give them a little time to see if they’re going to bring it back around or if we needed to call a timeout.”

The time-out finally came at 16-5 after Drageset, who had seven kills in the set; crushed an attack that ate up Archie Williams’ besieged back row. The Falcons showed late life after that, getting kills on the pins from Lauren Barnwell and Lindsey Jones, but they could get no closer than seven points and lost by nine, 25-16, ending the set on a whimper with three straight serving errors.

Archie Williams came out for the second set with the same personnel, but the Falcons lined up a different way. The adjustment immediately made the team more competitive. It didn’t hurt that Snipes, who hit negative with just two kills in the first set, started to heat up.

The game went back and forth with both setters, Neff for Buckley and Reece Fraser for Archie Williams, finding the hot hand. Drageset added to her impressive kill total with nine Game 2 kills. Snipes match her with nine of her own.

With the score knotted at 20-20, Archie Williams surged to earn the determinative points. Snipes, a speedy athlete, scored twice on tempo sets from Fraser and, in between, teamed with Rainey Preston on a block. The trio of points gave Archie Williams the cushion it needed to eke out the set, 25-22, recording the final point on a great pass from libero Phoebe Galland, another nice feed from Fraser, and one final putaway from Snipes.

The third set was similarly tight through the first 17 points for each side. Each team held no more than a three-point advantage and the teams were knotted at 17-all after Anene’s kill for Buckley.

Archie Williams went back on top on Fraser’s opportunistic two-handed dump, an attack she disguises well as a jump set before finishing to the middle of the court. Reff got the Griffins all square once more, using her 5-11 height to block down a ball.

In the end game, the trio of Fraser, Jones, and Snipes carried the day. Fraser had another sneaky dump, bettered a bad pass, and assisted on kills from Jones and Snipes. Snipes had three of her eight kills in the set on Archie Williams’ final three points, first hitting around the block then twice using the block to take the Falcons to the fourth set up 2-1 on the strength of their late-set superiority.

Buckley came out in Game 4 determined to pull out all the stops to get the match to a deciding fifth set. That included Drageset’s using her left on a set a little too wide to score with a sweet swing to a tough angle to square the set at 2-2.

Drageset and Wolfson carried Buckley, both at the net and from behind the service line, in the set’s early stages. Barnwell and Jones countered with scoring swings of their own, while Galland stepped up defensively and Snipes kept getting better and better and better. With Archie Williams down 11-10, Snipes fired a wicked shot from the back row into the corner to tie the set, then aced on a short serve to put the Falcons back into the lead. A Drageset pancake dig, Daly ace, and kills from Anene and Reff helped Buckley draw even at 15-15.

Two Wolfson scoring tips and two Archie Williams miscues meant a Buckley lead, 21-20, as the Griffins struggled to be first to 25 to extend the match. Jones delivered a nice cut shot that tied the set once again, and Archie Williams followed with two more, including a Galland set to 6-3 junior middle Katie Griffiths for a kill. Griffiths was a huge factor in that fourth set, delivering three kills on four swings.

Down 23-21, Buckley responded with two to get all square once more. Jadyn Greene’s massive stuff block was the equalizer.

Daly played some of her best defense for Buckley down the stretch and made an amazing dig on the next point to prolong a rally, but neither she nor any of her Griffin teammates could prevent Fraser’s ninth kill of the match, a perfectly timed two-handed to the center of the court.

“I often try to save my attacks for when I think I’ll really need them, like closer to the end of sets,” Fraser said. “I saw the blocker out of the corner of my eye. I saw she took a step off the net. I knew the dump was open and just went for it.  It happened to work.”

With Archie Williams now holding on to match point, the time was now for Snipes to shine brightest and earn the same glory for her team that she’d witnessed for her sister’s squad the evening before. You could feel all of that determination as she rose from the back row to destroy a set that had this reporter and those around him uttering just one word: “Wow.”

In the interview room after the match, the word Hudson used to describe the season was “Magical.”

“We have been the underdogs the whole season,” the coach explained. “We are not a very tall team. We were fifth in our really tough league. So for us to be able to come out of league in fifth place and not drop a set until today [in the NorCal playoffs] is so impressive and speaks to the energy and support our team has for one another. “

Jones and Barnwell complemented Snipes’ prodigious offensive output with a combined 27 kills of their own for Archie Williams. Galland had 15 digs. Fraser was an unsung hero, with nine kills and 48 assists. She engineered an offense that hit .341 for the match!

The Buckley School hit .290 for the match. On most days that would have been good enough. Drageset had 23 kills, 10 digs, three aces, and two blocks to lead the way. Wolfson and Adonia each contributed 11 kills. Reff had 42 assists and three blocks. Daly contributed a team-high 13 digs, with three assists.

“This match was a battle between two great teams,” Glasgow said. “We fought. We came up short. At the end of the day, we gave everything we had on the court and I’m 100 percent fine with that.”

Glasgow lauded Snipes, calling her a “fantastic player,” and encouraged his team to recognize what it had achieved this season despite the loss.

Clutching the runner-up trophy, he told his players, “No team on Buckley’s campus has this trophy in 90 years. We have broken history time and again. The outcome is that we made history.”