DUBLIN >> Jake Lee had a front-row seat to Pacific Collegiate School’s first Central Coast Section boys volleyball title in 2014. The freshman got called up from the junior varsity squad and rode the bench for most of the Pumas’ run.
Lee thought he’d never see a better team come out of PCS. Now, looking back, he knows he has.
“I was like, ‘They’re going to be the best volleyball players I’ve ever seen,’” the senior opposite said. “But to go further than them is amazing.”
The Pumas selflessly left room for the freshmen on this year’s squad to have the same revelation. They went farther than any team in Santa Cruz County ever has by reaching the California Interscholastic Federation’s NorCal D-II championship match. But on Saturday at Dublin High, PCS lost that title tilt to defending champion Saratoga, 25-19, 25-21, 21-25, 25-19.
“We played so well this season. We really wanted to win together,” Lee said. “But that was one of our worst games.”
Two weeks ago, PCS defeated Saratoga in five sets to claim the Pumas’ second CCS D-II title.
After that match, Falcons coach Jason Cardosa said his team had relied too much on dominant outside hitter Joel Schneidmiller. So when Saratoga got a rematch with PCS with the NorCal title on the line, he took the opposite approach. Literally.
Cardosa inserted Josh Li, a sophomore who had played the entire 2017 season on junior varsity, as an opposite into his starting lineup for the title match — arguably the biggest game of the year since boys volleyball has no state championship. The risk paid off, as the left-handed Li tallied 14 kills, second most on the team, and kept PCS from camping out on Schneidmiller.
“We were planning on leaving him alone,” PCS coach Scott Sanborn said, “but he went off on his own.”
With the Pumas forced to respect Li, they couldn’t completely commit to stopping Schneidmiller, a 6-foot-6 senior who will compete with UC Irvine next season. The outside took advantage, especially in the final two games, smacking a match-high 33 kills to help Saratoga (25-11) defend its NorCal title.
“It feels really good,” Schneidmiller said. “It’s too bad we wouldn’t win CCS, but this is bigger with better competition, and I wouldn’t want it any other way.”
For the Pumas (35-6), the loss was a somewhat bitter end to an especially sweet season. At the start of the year, they’d set out to win the Santa Cruz Coast Athletic League title. By accomplishing that, they earned the No. 1 seed in the CCS D-II tournament. Then, despite what their seeds said, they pulled off a major victory over the No. 6-seeded Falcons, the defending two-time CCS champions.
That promoted them to the NorCal tournament, where they routed first-round opponent Redwood and cruised past Placer despite enduring a six-hour ride to Auburn in Memorial Day traffic. With that last win, they made history, becoming the first Santa Cruz County team to reach the NorCal final.
And who should await them but the same team they fought off for the section title.
“If anyone told us we would make it this far, we wouldn’t have believed it then,” said Lee, one of three Pumas seniors. “I thought we played pretty well and never gave up.”
Case in point, PCS, with its season on the line and everything seemingly going the Falcons’ way, rallied back from down two sets to take Game 3. Having never led in the first set and only by one point briefly in the second set, the Pumas jumped out to a three-point lead early in the third set. They stretched that to seven points before withstanding a Falcons comeback attempt to claim the win.
The Pumas then traded points with Saratoga for the first third of Game 4 before the Falcons, behind a determined Schneidmiller, put it out of reach. Schneidmiller made five kills during Saratoga’s 9-2 run that broke open a 7-7 tie.
“We didn’t want a fifth game,” Cardosa said. “Anything can happen in a fifth game.”
Senior outside Wyatt Harrison, the SCCAL MVP, finished with 32 kills. Junior middle Phil Grote, an all-SCCAL first-team pick for the second straight season, added five, while setter Jake Sandidge made 42 assists.
Sanborn said, in the end, PCS ran too much of its offense through Harrison, in part because of defensive and passing struggles that stemmed from Saratoga’s different-look offense.
Lee made two blocks and four aces. Harrison also served four aces and senior middle Alex Gianella added two solo blocks.
“We had to rely on Wyatt too often,” Sanborn said. “He’s going to get his kills, but you can’t expect him to get every single point.”
That’s not the PCS way. If the Pumas showed anything this year, it’s that they do things as a team, from start to end.
“You never want to end a season with a loss, but at the same time, with our body of work, it’s been a great season,” Sanborn said.
“They deserved every second of this season.”
Contact Julie Jag at 831-706-3257.
