Randleman's volleyball team beats SW Randolph to land in final four

RANDLEMAN  — The word mindset came up an awful lot after the Randleman Tigers varsity volleyball team recorded a four-set win over Southwestern Randolph on Saturday in the East Regional semifinals in the RHS gymnasium.

The RHS players as well as head coach Kerry Mitchell talked about the importance of having the right mindset, especially after the Cougars grabbed the first set in the best-of-five battle between Randolph County teams. SWR was also coming off an upset of No. 1 seed Bunn two days earlier.

“We’ve been preaching all this playoff about mindset and no matter what your role looks like every game, your mindset has to be positive and your mindset has to be aggressive and confident,” Mitchell said after the Tigers recorded the 19-25, 25-22. 25-18, 25-18 win to improve to 23-4. 

“And that really started to show through as we progressed. They had the mindset that if they messed one up, they moved on quickly and moved on to the next play. They did a good job of trusting themselves and trusting each other.”

With the win, the Tigers advanced to Tuesday’s East Regional championship match at Uwharrie Charter Academy. The two teams, who were in the Piedmont Athletic Conference the past four seasons, had not met this year until Tuesday night. The winner of that match earns a berth to the NCHSAA state 4-A title game.

The mindset that has been stressed throughout the playoffs helped the Tigers overcome the 1-0 deficit as RHS rallied from a slight 15-14 deficit in Game 2 by scoring six straight points behind front-line players Lexi Vaughn, Karrington Jones and Lilah Covington.

“Our mindset, we just have to keep playing, staying up, can’t get down on ourselves,” said senior libero Kadie Green. “Volleyball is a really mental game and we had to keep the energy, momentum. After the first set, I told our girls we had to stay in mentally and play our game and stay aggressive and that’s what we did.”

After the Cougars’ impressive opening game, the Tigers evened the match with the Game 2 win before jumping out to a 7-0 lead in Game 3. Covington and Jones began dominating at the net and although SWR pulled to within 17-16, the Tigers went on a seven-point run to make it 24-16. A Vaughn push ended the set and gave RHS a 2-1 lead.

“We knew we could compete and knew what we could get it done,” Jones said. “We just had to show up and work as a team, communicate and prove ourselves.”

Covington had a stellar game at the net.

“In the past, sometimes we would have let up,” she said after the Game 1 setback. “But tonight, we just didn’t let that get to us and we did everything we could to come back. It didn’t take much for us because we wanted to win that bad.”

Game 4 was tight until the Tigers used a brief 5-2 spurt to extend a 16-15 lead in outscoring SWR 9-3 the rest of the way, including recording the final four points of the match behind the net play of Vaughn and Covington. 

“We didn’t control the ball,” SWR veteran coach Darby Kennedy said. 

“We had 30 hitting errors. You can’t win against anybody with 30 hitting errors much less a team that’s hitting back at you. 

“Randleman played really well at the net and Kadie was fantastic. We didn’t do our jobs the way we needed to.”

Despite the loss, which ended the Cougars season at 20-11, the team regrouped from an early 1-4 campaign. Playing against stout opposition, SWR was able to use those lessons learned to have another stellar campaign.

“They had a fantastic season, one nobody really expected us to have,” Kennedy said. “You go 1-4 in the first week or two and everyone is looking at you like this team is going to be terrible this year, and thankfully after that first week, we ended (20) and eleven. It’s an amazing season. I told them not to put the whole season on this one game, but at the moment it’s very frustrating. Randleman made adjustments, read the floor well, read our hitters well. They absolutely earned this game.”

It was a tale of two streaks heading into Tuesday’s match at UCA as the Tigers entered having won 20 of their past 21 matches with the only loss coming to SWR on Oct. 6. Meanwhile, UCA (27-3) brought in an incredible streak of 23 straight-set wins in a row, meaning the Eagles had won 69 straight sets this season.