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By Jacob Cersosimo & Chris Parker
This year’s Miller volleyball seniors have been building to this season their entire careers.
In 2018, they won 27 matches and were seeded No. 1 in their district but lost in the district title game. In 2019, they won 27 more matches and a district title but lost in the state sectional round. Last year, these seniors gave Miller 32 more wins and the program’s first ever final four appearance, but they came up short of the ultimate goal in third place.
This year was their year. Everything had led up to this run. The Lady Cardinals posted 32 wins on the way to the final four. Win No. 33 required beating an unbeaten Santa Fe team that had lost just three sets all season.
Miller delivered in a five-set thriller showing their experience and resiliency.
“They don’t get shook. They’ve played a lot of big games as volleyball and basketball players. They just don’t get shook,” Tamra Landers said. “We go hard in practice so that when we get here we are ready for that adversity because we face it in practice.”
That left the Cardinals needing win No. 34 to claim the program’s first state title, which would also be the first team state title in Miller history for a girls program, and just the second ever joining the 1994 football team.
One loss Gideon was the team standing in the way of the Miller Lady Cardinals and history.
That record did not intimidate the Lady Cardinals in the least.
“We didn’t pay attention to their record. We knew what we could do. We’ve had three losses all year. We have lost to some big schools, so we didn’t really focus on their record. We focused on what we needed to do as a team to get the win,” Miller head coach Tamra Landers said.
Landers’ request of her girls going into the state championship match was simple.
“I asked them right before ‘could we please win in three today?’,” Landers said. “They said ‘sure Coach T’.”
They delivered on that promise in a dominant 3-0 sweep of Gideon to set off a celebration Miller has been waiting on for a long time.
The championship might have meant the most to Landers who played her high school volleyball at Miller and has been coaching on the staff since 1995.
“I knew this group could do it. I knew they were the group that really wanted to do it. They wanted to do it for themselves, but they are such great girls that they wanted to do it for me too. They wanted to get that state championship for us because we have not had it before.”
CLICK HERE FOR PHOTOS OF THE MATCH
Miller came out hot in the first set jumping out to a 4-0 lead. Gideon cut the lead to 6-5 before a 9-0 run by Miller essentially put the match away. The Cardinals won the first set 25-15.
The second set was much more tightly contested with Gideon leading 17-14 at one point. Miller responded again. The Cardinals shut the set down with an 11-3 run to take it 25-20.
Miller quickly took the drama out of the third set by jumping out to a 12-3 lead on the way to a 25-17 victory to clinch the sweep.
Miller was relentless on the attack, which helped neutralize a strong Gideon defense.
“Their (Gideon’s) defense is amazing. We felt like if we could keep our hitters swinging and swinging that we would eventually wear them down with how much we move the ball around,” Landers said.
Haylie Schnake put down a team-high 11 kills. Kaylee Helton (eight kills), Claudia Hadlock (six kills), Ashten Kingsley (five kills) and Emberlynn Kingsley (four kills) all contributed to the Miller attack. Alli Mitchell distributed 32 assists.
Addison Stockton (25 digs), Helton (22 digs), Hadlock (20 digs) and Schnake (15 digs) all contributed double-digit digs.
Miller dominated that the net with five solo blocks and 12 block assists. Gideon posted zeroes in both of those categories.
The Cardinals fired on all cylinders in the title match.
“Last year we were much more nervous. We didn’t have a senior on the roster, so we were young. We weren’t as nervous this year. We knew what it was like,” Miller senior Claudia Hadlock said. “We are just intense and I think that is what helped us. Everybody played well today. We were all clicking, and that is when you need to be clicking in the state championship.”
It was almost cathartic for Miller to finally break through for a state title in such a dominant fashion after coming into the season with a championship-or-bust mentality.
“We’ve had pressure all season long. As soon as everybody heard we were 1A everybody was saying ‘you are going to win a state championship’,” Landers said. “We have had to come up with ways to not think about it because there was a lot of pressure. They were not going to be happy unless they got a state championship. Now they have it.”
Miller’s senior group that includes Kaylee Helton, Ashten Kingsley, Claudia Hadlock and Alli Mitchell finish their volleyball careers with 120 wins in four seasons including three district titles, a Class 2 third place finish and a Class 1 state championship.
“We have played together since the first grade. It means the world to play with my best friends,” Hadlock said. “We do everything together. (The feeling of being a state champion) is unexplainable.”
