CHANUTE — Firing past Pittsburg and Parsons, the Chanute Blue Comets won their fourth straight SEK League volleyball title on Monday in their final regular season matches.
Parsons and Pittsburg also defeated Fort Scott in the quad while Chanute locked up the No. 1 seed in the KSHSAA 4A East Sub-State.
“It shows the amount of hard work these girls put in from top to bottom,” Chanute head coach Jory Murry said. “Our C-team and JV team have only lost a handful of games this season. Everyone works hard in the summer. They get in the weight room. This shows how it all pays off.”
Chanute locks up league crown with sweep of Pittsburg Despite trailing 11-3 in the second set, the Blue Comets swept the Pittsburg Purple Dragons, 2-0 (25-20, 25-22) in their first match of the night.
The win gave Chanute the outright SEK title.
“Our girls never count themselves out,” Murry said. “I was out of timeouts and we just had to dig deep. They had to work hard for each other and figure it out. And they did that.”
Stats were unavailable at press time.
Parsons breezes past Fort Scott
In the Vikings’ first match of the night, Parsons swept Fort Scott, 2-0 (25-14, 25-12).
“I thought we just played well overall,” Parsons head coach Dara Barr-Miller said. “It was a tough game to get momentum going. But we executed our plays and did what we had to do to finish it off.”
Blue Comets blast Vikings Punctuating the quad, Chanute swept Parsons, 2-0 (2519, 25-12).
“They just have a ton of weapons and always come at you,” Barr-Miller said. “It’s hard to keep up with it. You can stop someone and someone has their back. We gave them too many free balls. They have so much power and then we’re constantly playing defense. They handle free balls very well.”
The match was virtually meaningless for the Blue Comets with the league title and top sub-state seed locked up.
“I told the girls that it was a no-pressure situation,” Murry said. “They had secured our No. 1 seed and secured the league title. So we just went into that game thinking we wanted to really enjoy it. We talked about playing relaxed, and that’s what they did.”
But Chanute had the intention to run through the finish line with intention.
“Their thoughts were that they wanted to play all-in,” Murry said. “That’s always been their mindset. They’re not done yet.”
Up next Parsons has two more dates on its schedule — Thursday at Galena then Tuesday at Coffeyville. The Vikings, at press time, are 23-10 overall and in sixth place in the sub-state standings.
“We’ll watch our film, especially against Chanute,” Barr-Miller said. “They’re a great team to figure out what we’re doing wrong and put people in the right places. We know we’re small on the outsides, so we try to have our defense help with that. We have to keep working on our mental game. Our mental game has to be tough. The rest will fall into place.”
As for Chanute, it gets a dozen days off before hosting one of four sub-state tournaments with a state tournament berth at stake.
“We just want to go into it with the confidence of what we’ve done so far this season,” Murry said. “Once we get there, we’ll take it one ball at a time. There’s not necessarily any other pressure.”
Chanute will likely face Bishop Miege in the semifinals (also the first round) next Saturday. Despite being 5-22 overall, Bishop Miege (No. 4) is ranked higher in the Kansas Volleyball Association’s rankings than Chanute (No. 6).
