PIAA-3A: La Salle beats Pennridge, earns first ever state playoff victory
WYNDMOOR — The culture has been a magnet.
“The culture attracts. We have really intelligent kids here and they’re very good athletes, but they’ve never played volleyball,” said La Salle coach Jason Eisele. “And the culture we’ve developed is sort of set up where athletes wanna come and join and compete. It’s a great cross-training sport, and I think it’s benefited our other sports.”
Eisele has been there since the program was born in 2014. He served as an assistant coach then, took over as head coach in 2016 and on Tuesday, he saw the Explorers take a major step, earning a 3-0 (25-21, 25-14, 25-23) victory over perennial power Pennridge in the opening round of the PIAA-3A Tournament.
It was the first state playoff victory in La Salle’s history.
Said senior Owen Huy, who filled a significant role: “It means a lot. We wanted to play as well as we can. We started off extremely strong and just kept going from there.”
The victory sends the District 12 Champs to a state quarterfinal game on Saturday against the winner of the Central York-North Allegheny matchup.
A tremendous season came to a close for Pennridge (15-5).
“They did a good job blocking us and hitting the ball. We were starting to play a little bit better and then we had a few errors strung together and they took advantage of it,” Rams coach Dave Childs said. “La Salle did a good job and did what they had to do.”
Jude Rotondo (20 kills), Bryce Ammon (32 assists), Thomas McKinney (seven kills, seven digs) and Ty Porter (five digs) all made key contributions for the Rams.
Pennridge jumped out to an 11-5 lead in Game One but then the Explorers made their move.
They would put together an 8-2 run to draw even at 13, then go on to earn a pivotal 25-21 victory. La Salle surged to an 8-3 advantage in Game Two and led the whole way in a 25-14 victory, which produced a crucial 2-0 lead.
“(Coming back from 11-5) was big,” Eisele said. “Our competitive nature in practice (helped us there). We have a deep bench and we’ve been very, very competitive. I tell the guys constantly, that if we play like we practice, we play great volleyball.
“That first set was huge, to come back from that deficit. That gave the guys a lot of confidence and they stayed loose.”
Sam Johnsson, Dan Van Thuyne, Matthew Braccia and Colin Broderick were part of a balanced effort by the Explorers. La Salle generated one final surge in Game Three, rallying back and closing it out in three.
“This team came in at the beginning of the year and said, ‘we’re gonna make history,'” Eisele said. “They put in the work and you saw it today.”
“We just kept flowing through,” Huy said. “The few mistakes we had, we came back from. And did even better.”
