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NOSSA volleyball final goes down to the wire

The Lockerby Vikings senior boys volleyball team were on the verge of having a very good season, but it all fell apart in the end.
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The Lockerby Vikings senior girls volleyball team are off to a good start to their 2015-16 campaign, winning the Lasalle Invitational Tournament last weekend. File photo.
The Lockerby Vikings senior boys volleyball team were on the verge of having a very good season, but it all fell apart in the end.

Posting an 8-0 record in regular season play, the Vikings were upset in the city final last weekend by the Lasalle Lancers. But with no North Bay entries in the NOSSA AA tournament being hosted at Lockerby, the Vikes were considered the favourites to emerge from the all-Sudbury field that also included the Division B champion St. Benedict Bears, as well as the Lo-Ellen Park Knights.

While the Knights improved in leaps and bounds over the course of the season, the reality was that Lockerby had handled their south-end rivals with ease when the two teams met in the SDSSAA semifinals less than two weeks ago.

Needless to say, a round-robin loss at NOSSA on Friday to the Knights had the Vikings fearing, at least to some extent, a repeat of the SDSSAA gold-medal encounter.

And while a very scrappy Knights defence gave the Lockerby lads everything they could handle, coach Stephen Beausoleil and company would eventually earn a return trip to AA OFSAA with a 25-21, 28-26 triumph.

"We were kind of bummed out that we didn't win the city finals, and we lost to Lo-Ellen yesterday," noted veteran Taylor Lavoie, one of four returnees to the team that travelled to Dryden last November.

"But we had a meeting with the coach, and we managed to pull it together. We just had to pay attention to the perimeter defence, and the intensity needed to be upped a bit more. We had a crowd this time, and we had the bench going."

While many of the top-end high school volleyball teams need to learn to tone down the emotional output in order to play at their peak, the Vikings are just the opposite, needing to stoke the competitive fires even more.

"We get quiet some times, even when we score points," acknowledged Lavoie. "When we have the intensity up, we crush balls, we dig balls, we do well." Lockerby will now make a return visit to Dryden, installed as the sixth seed in a 20-team field that opens play this Thursday.

Meanwhile, the down-to-the-wire NOSSA final provided quite a conclusion to the season for the Knights, who were on the verge of not having a program this year, with no coach seemingly available.

Parent Norm Milford stepped in, and before the end of the season, enlisted the help of Lo-Ellen graduate and former professional player Kristina Fabris to assist, allowing the 5-3 regular season fourth-place Division I team to go toe to toe with the Vikings in the end.

In the junior NOSSA AA final at Lockerby, the St. Joseph Scollard Hall Bears were just a touch better than the Lasalle Lancers, with the North Bay reps beating the locals 25-20, 25-23 to claim their medals.

In North Bay, the senior Lancers could not repeat their upset of one week earlier, falling in straight sets to the Widdifield Wildcats in the NOSSA AAA final. A somewhat similar story with the Collège Notre-Dame Alouettes senior boys team in Espanola on Friday, dropping all three of their round-robin games; therefore, they are not advancing to the NOSSA A final.

While there is no OFSAA competition at the end of the line for the B schools, the Champlain Requins did manage to walk away with bragging rights in the four-team NOSSA event, besting Wasse Abin from Manitoulin Island 25-13, 25-20 in the championship encounter.

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