Ben Lomond volleyball relishing 1st win since 2015 after beating APA West Valley
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- Ben Lomond’s Nicole Sevilla passes the volleyball during a practice on Monday, Sept. 12, 2022, at Ben Lomond High School.
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- Ben Lomond High’s volleyball team practices Monday, Sept. 12, 2022, at Ben Lomond High School.
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- Ben Lomond’s Brianna Reyes passes the volleyball during a practice on Monday, Sept. 12, 2022, at Ben Lomond High School.
OGDEN — After 2,556 days — or 6 years, 11 months and 30 days — Ben Lomond High’s volleyball team celebrated. The Scots can probably be forgiven if they didn’t know how to celebrate a win. It had been quite a while.
On Friday, the Scots defeated American Preparatory Academy-West Valley in an epic, five-set match for their first win since 2015.
When the ball finally hit the floor to secure the Scots a match victory, the team celebrated as if it had won everything.
“Amazing. I shed a tear, I was so happy,” sophomore Traelynn Adger said Monday.
At Monday’s practice, the team was back at it, working on court positioning, communication and defensive alignment.
But everyone was still relishing what had happened in that same gym about 72 hours earlier by a score of 25-21, 20-25, 25-18, 24-26, 16-14.
“When we won on Friday — I don’t know, I still haven’t really, like, realized that we actually won,” junior Sophia Morris said.
Friday’s win was almost seven years to the day since Ben Lomond’s last win on Sept. 10, 2015, against American Leadership Academy.
Six straight winless seasons would follow, a period spanning, among other things, two separate gymnasiums at BLHS.
“It has been (hard) and I feel like we have to really lift them up half the time just to say, ‘Hey let’s ignore this, let’s think about what we did. We did this, this and this.’ You could see the disappointment, especially the first year, it was eye opening to see the disappointment and stuff on the girls’ faces as they, I mean, nobody likes to get (beat),” BL head coach Angie Williams said.
The exact number of consecutive losses is difficult to calculate due to incomplete record keeping, as well as changes to record-keeping websites, such as MaxPreps and newspaper websites, that have inadvertently wiped old articles off of the internet.
According to a cursory search of MaxPreps, Standard-Examiner and Deseret News archives, as well as consulting with reporters at the Logan Herald Journal, approximately 130 matches separated Ben Lomond’s win against ALA in 2015 and the Scots’ win on Friday against APA-West Valley.
The players didn’t know the losing streak was almost seven years long until Williams told them.
“I sorta knew that we hadn’t won in a while. Ben Lomond does sports, but we’re not known for sports,” Adger said.
The last several seasons have been hard for the program. It’s hard for players to show up every day when almost every match is a lopsided loss. At Ben Lomond, real life often intervenes and takes priority over sports.
If Williams has the entire team at practice on the same day, that might be considered a win.
“The things they’re dealing with sometimes are so hard. The fact that they’re showing up and they’re here is awesome. And we just keep talking about how they persevere and how they overcome, and I think that’s been an important thing for them to keep pushing and get better,” Williams said.
Williams estimated that since she took over as BL head coach in 2020, after more than a decade at Bonneville High, she’s had two players with any sort of club volleyball experience. Morris said she picked up volleyball last year as a way to make friends. Adger said she came to a BLHS volleyball camp in the sixth grade.
“The teams that we play, they’ve been playing since they were like 10 years old, doing clubs year round, and a lot of our team is just brand new. We’re all trying our hardest, if we don’t win it’s just kind of — you get used to it,” Morris said.
Leading up to Friday’s match, the first of BL’s home tournament, Williams had seen the team improve in practice and in matches. She tried to instill some belief in the players beforehand.
“I always tell the girls every Disney movie’s made because a team that wasn’t supposed to win won,” Williams said.
The Scots won the first set 25-21. That’s when the players realized this match was a little different.
“So the first one, I was excited, but I also wasn’t, like, too hyped up because,” Adger said, lowering her voice, “I wasn’t expecting us to win.”
“And then when we won our second one I was like, ‘Alright we got this,'” she added.
The Eagles won the second set 25-20, but Williams says the Scots made a late run in the second and carried momentum to the third, where they won 25-18.
The Scots had a handful of match points late in the fourth, but APA-West Valley saved them all and sent the match to a nervy fifth set.
BL’s first goal in the fifth set was to be the first team to 5 points, then the first team to 10 points and then, obviously, the first team to 15.
“We get down sometimes, especially if it’s been a long day at school, everybody’s having a rough time in the game. But it was just cool to see the entire team just, like, giving so much energy and we all started to realize, kind of one by one, we could actually win this. Towards the end, we were just working so hard to get the ball over the net,” Morris said.
BL saved a match point and eventually served leading 15-14. The serve return was shanked. Some started to celebrate.
Williams nervously waited until the ball hit the floor, having seen plenty of moments when volleyball teams rescue points by hitting the deck, sliding into bleachers, holding your arm out and pulling a rabbit out of a hat.
Not Friday.
“People don’t think about that, but getting them to feel ‘OK this is what it feels like to win and we did it, we did it,’ I hope that that will help them see that they can achieve their goals not even just in here but everywhere, right? Hopefully it will lead to maybe another win and another one. We’ll see,” Williams said.
Connect with reporter Patrick Carr via email at pcarr@standard.net, Twitter @patrickcarr_ and Instagram @standardexaminersports.
