Cary-Grove's championship truly was a remarkable run
NORMAL - Even sports writers sometimes get caught up in how quickly a state tournament starts and ends. With me, it's usually on the drive home that I start thinking about all the things that go into winning a state championship that there weren't room or time to write about over the weekend.
It's been a long time since a school covered by the Fox Valley editions of the Daily Herald has won a team state championship. In fact, one could argue that Cary-Grove being crowned queen of the Class 4A girls volleyball world becomes the first state champion from the original core of schools we've covered since the newspaper began circulating in northern Fox and southern McHenry counties. When Hampshire won its state football championship in 1995, we weren't yet the fixture in Whip-Purland that we are now. Prairie Ridge, a school we cover as space and resources allow, won the state baseball title in 2004, when space and resources allowed.
But Cary and Fox River Grove are communities we've covered since March of 1995 when we opened our Fox Valley bureau, right about the time a young coach named Patty Griffith took over the Cary-Grove girls volleyball program from Stefanie Otto.
Griffith, now Langanis of course, was 16-18-1 her first season at Cary-Grove, but the Trojans haven't had a losing season since, and the personable Langanis, who has now won a high school state championship as a player and a coach, has racked up over 400 wins in her C-G career.
The "rock star" status the Cary-Grove volleyball team currently enjoys could be short-lived, though, as the Trojans' football team clearly has its sites set on recreating the Sunday homecoming pep rally in the C-G gym with a Class 6A state championship trophy to place beside the volleyball hardware.
But for now, it's Cary-Grove's girls who are responsible for yet another story of how high school sports can bond a community, bring pride to a school, and tears to their followers' eyes.
In retrospect, the thought I couldn't get out of my head on that trip up Interstate 39 was that this team was done. They were at match point against Glenbrook South in Friday's semifinals and many along press row had already penciled the Trojans into Saturday's third-place match.
But one thing I learned long ago about Cary-Grove teams, coaches and athletes is that they never say never. The community itself is close-knit and has been through its share of life tragedies. They have a fantastic leader and role model in the volleyball program in Langanis, and every program in the school has the support of athletic director Bruce Kay, a graduate of the school himself, and the longtime head football coach who so badly deserves to be hoisting the gold in Champaign next weekend. Moments after Kay's football team beat De La Salle in Saturday's state quarterfinal game, he high-tailed it to Redbird along with many others, including a lot of his players. Their presence added to what was about 1,000 people clad in Trojan blue and white who were on hand to support the volleyball team.
"I'm just extremely proud of the way these kids and coaches have done such a great job," Kay said Saturday night at Redbird Arena while waiting to receive his medal along with the rest of the Cary-Grove contingent. "Their performance (in Friday's comeback win) showed their true character. This is just great for the kids and great for the community."
The players appreciated the tremendous fan support as well, especially from their classmates.
"That was awesome," said junior Colleen Smith. "Seeing everybody up there wearing white and screaming all night was just amazing."
Don't count the Trojans out for another trip to state next year. With Smith, sophomore bomber Ashley Rosch, and Kelly Lamberti, one of the best outsides in the country, returning (among others) their chances are good to make a return trip. Like most teams, once they've tasted the euphoria of a state championship they want to taste it again.
State of the state: IHSA Assistant Executive Director Sue Hinrichsen, who administers volleyball for the association, will retire at the end of the school year, and she believes the state she's leaving volleyball in for her replacement is good.
"I feel good about things," Hinrichsen said. "Volleyball has gone through tremendous changes and we're in good shape."
Some observers expressed concern over the weekend about the time schedule of the state tournament. A plethora of 3-game matches on Saturday caused the scheduled 7:45 p.m. Class 4A championship match to not start until 9:30. Matches at state are scheduled one hour apart with a break between the Class1-2A session and the Class 3-4A session.
"This year was quite different," Hinrichsen said. "We've charted times and we know that typically a match takes 44 minutes and there's 16 minutes of warmup. That's an hour. This year we had 10 matches go 3 games. I don't think we'll see it get tighter than it did this year. People forget that when we had sideouts instead of rally scoring it was a greater unknown. Those matches could take forever. The system in place now is good. It's not broke so why fix it?"
jradtke@dailyherald.com