COLORADO SPRINGS – Having witnessed tournament underdog Bayfield expend as much, if not more energy on Friday night in a wild five-game ouster of defending state champion Eaton than her own squad had in the preceding contest, a five-game loss to Lamar, Sterling’s Lisa Schumacher knew the elated Lady Wolverines could be dangerous in the teams’ survival showdown Saturday morning.
“Bayfield looked good. I mean, they are a great team – Terene (Foutz) is an awesome coach – and when you play a great team it doesn’t matter if they played at night or in the morning,” Schumacher said. “It really doesn’t matter; you’ve just got to know you have to compete no matter what.”
“We really just wanted to go at (Eaton) hard, hit all the balls – fight fire with fire,” said BHS senior Payton Killough.
Facing a fourth Patriot League power in three days during the CHSAA State Championships’ Class 3A feature, and fifth within a week, Bayfield gamely battled back from a first-game collapse but ultimately couldn’t steal a stanza from Sterling in a season-ending 25-13, 26-24 and 25-23 loss.
“We always want to start off strong; that’s our goal,” said BHS senior Annie Fusco. “It usually doesn’t work out quite like that, but we know we can’t give up. We just have to fight through that.”
“We wanted to come out and have a lot of energy … and have a lot of fun,” senior setter Sage Killough said. “So every kill is fun and exciting; we were all happy for each other.”
But never more so than Friday night when Fusco banged a game-winning ball off the outside of 5-foot-10-inch Eaton blocker Madison Crider’s forearm, sending the sphere deflecting down and out of bounds to cap a 25-22, 26-28, 22-25, 25-19, 19-17 conquest of the classification’s perennial conquerors.
The Lady Wolverines erased a large EHS lead in Game 1 with a 9-1 run to take the set. Bayfield then rallied out of an 11-3 hole in Game 2 to eventually earn a 15-14 advantage before falling. Never to be counted out in the postseason, the Lady Reds evened the match at one game apiece when Rylee Martin roofed down a BHS over-pass and Emily Maske followed up with a kill.
The combatants’ intensity continued magnifying in Game 3. Fusco placed a perfect ace short, but Eaton’s Megan St. Jean responded cleverly with possibly the best point-producing set-dump. Eaton’s Madison Chavez then blocked Sage Killough to tie the score at 8-8. Bayfield’s K’Lee Stuffelbeam-Jolly would tip down an EHS over-pass to regain a 13-12 lead, but a subsequent long serve plus three straight Graci Reider aces helped Eaton go up 18-13 en route to a three-point win.
Able to trade points all the way to 8-8 in Game 4, the Lady Wolverines – initially seeded 12th in the 12-team bracket – then erased a short-lived 12-8 EHS lead to tie at 13-13 via a Payton Killough cross-court kill. Fusco followed with a kill and, after an Eaton timeout, Sage Killough and Stuffelbeam-Jolly combined to stuff Martin and put BHS in control all the way to game point, 24-19, with senior Emily Nelson also spiking a kill off a diving Lady Red. Eaton’s next offensive attack went into the net, tying the match at 2-2.
“Our defense was doing a good job telling us where holes were, so that made it a lot easier to place the ball,” Nelson said.
In Game 5, No. 7 seed Lady Reds stormed out to an 11-6 lead in the race to 15. Back-to-back Nelson aces trimmed Eaton’s lead to 11-9 and pressed EHS coach Gwen Forster into calling timeout. Fusco would cut it to 11-10 with a kill and Bayfield finally pulled even at 13-13 via a deep-corner bulls-eye of an ace from senior Karyssa Gosney.
“I would argue she’s the best server on the team,” Foutz had said earlier in the postseason. “Gosney locates where you ask her to serve – that’s a ‘Karyssa kill,’ an ace. She’s the kid to whom I can call any location on the court and she’ll hit it.”
Undaunted, Eaton brought up the first of what would end up being five match points when Maske downed a kill. Fusco countered with a scoring tip, only to see Martin lace a kill down the line for a 15-14 EHS lead. Lady Wolverine Kenasea Byrd bought BHS more time with a re-tying tip, and Bayfield then gained the upper hand when Payton Killough scored with a tip.
Eaton knotted up the score at 16-and 17-all, but with the Lady Wolverines now the aggressors, EHS found itself on the brink of elimination, down 18-17 after Payton Killough dropped over yet another successful tip.
“Doing that helped us spread out their side, for sure” Killough said. “I just wanted to push them, get them out of system.”
Having already outlasted 11th-seeded Intermountain League rival Alamosa in a full pull to begin Friday, Bayfield incredibly completed another five-game winner when Fusco summoned about all the guts she had left to blast Sage Killough’s last set.
“I was really appreciative of Sage,” Fusco said. “She was reading the block of the other team, was able to get me a lot of one-on-ones – or no blocks up – for me so I could just pound. It was great.”
“They really had a strong block,” Fusco noted. “I was trying a whole bunch of different angles the whole night, but … the main thing, what was working, was swiping off of the right side; we knew that was successful so we tried to really work that.”
Back in May at the Broadmoor, Eaton downed Sterling – the 2019 state champion – 25-14, 23-25, 25-20 and 25-22 to polish off an 18-0, COVID-delayed spring 2021 campaign as state champs. The loss to Bayfield left EHS with a 16-12 overall record while BHS reached the 20-win plateau for the first time since 2016.
“It’s a really good opportunity we had to play them again,” Fusco said, recalling the 2019 state clash with Eaton, which the Reds won 3-0, at the Denver Coliseum. “And for a decade they’d always … like, got state titles and everything. It’s just amazing.”
“That was a big test of mental strength,” Nelson said. “Going that many points in the last (game) is tough, but I’m going to remember it forever.”
Assured of departing the Broadmoor World Arena with a winning championships record, there was no real downside for the Lady Wolverines when they suited up to square off with N0. 6 Sterling bright and early on Saturday.
Bayfield, however, quickly fell into a hole when consecutive aces by Lady Tiger Jalyssa Maker put Sterling up 14-10 en route to a 12-point SHS Game 1 win.
A Stuffelbeam-Jolly kill plus Payton Killough ace helped BHS build a 12-8 lead in Game 2. Sterling again swayed fate when Ady Santomaso tooled a kill off Bayfield’s block, Kaylee Johnson aced a diving Nelson, and Sydney Henry roofed a Fusco swing to tie the score at 12-all.
BHS forged on, fighting off two Sterling approaches to reach game point, 24-22. Showing the type of resiliency which earned their program the 2019 state title, the Lady Tigers coldly stole a 2-0 match lead when Emerie Rios downed a kill, Henry served two aces and Kaylee Myers rejected an attempted kill.
“When you get a couple aces it gains you momentum to be able to go, ‘Hey, we’re OK!’” said Schumacher, who’d logged her 500th varsity win earlier in the tournament. “We did start out a little slow, a little tight; we’ve just got to learn to relax, have fun and whatever happens, happens.”
“We needed to run, like, a faster-paced ball against them, because something like high-ball, high ball … won’t ever win a really tough match,” Henry said.
Two Fusco kills and a Byrd block of Rios helped Bayfield swap evenly with Sterling in Game 3, tying the match 6-6. The Wolverines kept pressuring the Tigers all the way to the end. After a Foutz timeout, a Fusco kill brought BHS back to 23-22, but SHS answered with a Henry tip after fielding a Gosney serve.
Fusco staved off match point once with her final prep-level put-away, but Sterling (22-7 overall) prevailed when Maker and Myers denied Nelson inside the near antenna and the ricochet grazed just enough of BHS’ sideline to be ruled in bounds.
Stopped just short of the single-elimination semifinals, Bayfield finished the season 20-10 overall.
Sterling’s season came to an end in the semis with a 25-16, 25-22, 25-22 loss to Greeley-based Patriot Leaguers University. No. 4, University, which also beat Bayfield on Thursday, then upset No. 2 Lamar 21-25, 25-22, 25-17, 25-17 in the 3A state title match.
Lamar (28-1) was back in a final four for the first time since losing the 1997 Class 4A State Championship game to Durango.
