Broncos advance to first championship match in program’s 3 years
By Tim Wester
Sports Correspondent
It’s payback time.
After taking plenty of painful lumps during its first two seasons as a varsity program, the Union Grove boys volleyball team is starting to return a few blows to its opponents.
Union Grove grinded its way to the program’s first championship match on its way to an impressive second place finish at the South Milwaukee Invite Saturday, Sept. 3.
“We had a very positive day on the court for our first competition of the year,” said Union Grove coach Dan Dresen, who has directed the program from the beginning. “We advanced to our first championship match as a program in just our third varsity season, so it was a very memorable day for the program.”
Senior outside hitter Robert Walusay led the way with 8 aces, 45 kills, while junior Eli Scheckel racked up 31 kills and seven aces, and junior Dax Cramer had 95 assists and 18 digs to lead the offensive attack. On the defensive side, Tyler Gamble registered 20 digs, and Riley Hale had seven blocks.
Dresen also singled out freshman Sam Rampulla for his impressive effort in his first varsity match of his career.
“We had a lot of guys that needed match experience to feel out the pace of play at a high level,” Dresen said. “And we were able to accomplish just that.”
The Grove’s memorable day actually started on a sour note with a 2-0 loss to Racine Case (25-19, 25-20) in pool play.
But a gritty three-set victory over Whitefish Bay (25-21, 26-27, 15-9) in the next match turned things around for the Broncos.
Union Grove then followed the victory over Whitefish Bay with impressive victory over Waukesha North (25-12, 26-24) to finish 2-1 in pool play and advance to the semifinals against Wilmot.
The Southern Lakes Conference rivals then exchanged victories in the first two sets before the Broncos finally grabbed the upper hand with a 16-14 victory in the third set to advance to their first championship match in program history.
“We battled well in some tight matches last Saturday and we’re able to come out on top in most of the matches when facing adversity,” Dresen said. “It was a great learning day for the Broncos.”
One of the lessons learned was to avoid Racine Case. After dropping their pool play match against Case, the Broncos earned another shot in the championship match, but came up short in three sets.
Case nabbed the first set 25-21 before Union Grove answered with a 25-20 second set win. Then in the tournament-deciding match, Case came away the victor with a 15-9 triumph.“We had plenty of things to build upon from this tournament experience,” Dresen said. “We don’t have a lot of kids on the team that play club sports so for a lot of the players, they are still trying to get up to speed because they haven’t played volleyball for a while. With that said, we had quite the impressive performance.”
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