The streak is over.
It took No. 6-ranked St. Henry five sets to do what them and every other Ninth Region team had been trying to do for five years: topple the volleyball giants, No. 2-ranked Notre Dame. The Crusaders did it by completing the reverse sweep, 3-2 (18-25, 24-26, 27-25, 25-20, 15-11), on the Pandas’ home floor.
To show the magnitude of what the Pandas accomplished up to that point, the last time Notre Dame lost to a Ninth Region opponent came on Oct. 28, 2021, when St. Henry defeated the Pandas in the Ninth Region championship.
That was 1,769 days, or four years, 10 months and four days, ago.
Since then, Notre Dame had won 59 total matches against Ninth Region opponents.
Of those 59 victories, 53 came by sweep.
St. Henry refused to become the next team added to that list.
Before going into Park Hills, the Crusaders took on another top-25 team, No. 14 Beechwood, in the All “A” Championship last Thursday, falling 2-1 in a tough loss.
Still, as the saying goes, iron sharpens iron, and the Crusaders believe that experience helped prepare them for Tuesday night.
Just like against Beechwood, they faced adversity and a loud environment featuring huge student sections on both sides.
“They’re a great team with great players, and I think losing that really helped us get momentum back for this game,” St. Henry junior Madelyn Keipert said. “We practiced harder, pushed harder.”
The Crusaders walked into another championship-like environment and found themselves one set from a loss before they could get their footing. Notre Dame controlled the opening set and edged St. Henry in a back-and-forth second set, putting the Pandas one set away from extending their remarkable run.
It was a position St. Henry knew all too well.
The Crusaders had fallen behind Notre Dame 2-0 in last year’s Ninth Region championship, only to push the match to five sets before ultimately falling short. Less than a year later, St. Henry again found themselves staring at the same deficit against the same opponent.
This time, there would be a different ending.
“You play five for a reason,” St. Henry head coach Maureen Kaiser said. “We’ve got a lot of young girls learning the game and learning spots. By game two, you should know where the holes are and where their strengths are, and we kind of just played our game. We controlled our passing game and our defensive game, and things just fell into place for us.”
In the third set, Notre Dame was two points away from making it 60 straight Ninth Region victories, with the score tied at 24. Three of the next four points went to the Crusaders, including the set-winning point from Ashley Hammond, keeping St. Henry alive.
The fourth set provided little breathing room, either. St. Henry led 20-18 before closing on a 5-2 run to force a deciding fifth set.
The Crusaders never allowed Notre Dame to regain control in the fifth. St. Henry played with the confidence of a team that had already survived the biggest hurdle of the night, closing out the 15-11 victory and completing the comeback on a Hadley Lemmond kill.
“St. Henry did a really great job of making adjustments throughout the match,” Notre Dame co-head coach Madison Salkowski said. “They kept scoring on us in certain positions, and we weren’t able to make those adjustments. I think our girls really need to take away the fact that everybody’s a competitor in the Ninth Region — us, St. Henry, Ryle and so many teams in the region — and that we have to come to play this year.”
For nearly five years, the Pandas had been the team every Ninth Region opponent had to go through.
On Tuesday night, St. Henry finally went through them.
“It feels great,” St. Henry junior Violet Main said. “We’ve been competing with them every single year, and we knew it was going to be a fight. Even when we were down two sets, we knew we had to flip a switch immediately, and my teammates stepped up.”
The Crusaders take on Dixie Heights next, while the Pandas head to Louisville to face Mercy.
MORE PHOTOS: Provided by Charles Bolton
CRUSADERS 3, PANDAS 2
ST. HENRY — 18-24-27-25-15 — 3
NOTRE DAME — 25-26-25-20-11 — 2
Records: St. Henry 9-3, Notre Dame 5-3
