There was no trick play. No elaborate plan. Just reassurance.
With their backs to the wall, the Academy at Palumbo girls volleyball team remembered the key element that had gotten them all the way to the Public League championship game.
“We talk all the time about trusting your training,” Griffins coach EJ Goldstein said. “In my opinion, there’s no other team in the city that puts in the work that they do. I just have to constantly remind them that they are doing all the of this because they love the sport and they have fun. At the end of the day, you have to believe that all the work you put in is going to pay off.”
The Griffins dug deep, fought off a pair of match points during a pivotal fourth set, and stormed to victory in the winner-take-all fifth set in a heart-stopping thriller against two-time defending champion Central High School on Oct. 30 at Abraham Lincoln High School in Northeast Philadelphia.
Academy at Palumbo won its sixth PPL championship and first in four years by defeating Central in yet another meeting of perennial powerhouses. Central had defeated the Griffins the last two years in the championship game.
“We’ve been waiting since last year,” said junior setter Eva Truong. “We’ve worked really hard since July. Three months of hard work and we were just really happy to get this win.”
Central won the first set 25-19 before Palumbo took the second set 25-16. The Griffins rode that momentum to a big early lead in the third stanza before Central rallied to steal it 25-23. Other teams might have cracked after the disappointing outcome.
“We’re so young,” Goldstein said. “We have a freshman outside one, a sophomore outside two and a freshman libero. These are three really key, important pieces to win any volleyball match. In these games versus Central especially, we can struggle with confidence. But we win with them and we lose with them.”
Those young players stepped up in the most crucial moments. Despite trailing in the fourth set and down to their last point on more than one occasion, freshman starters Anna Bracali and Lily Abbott displayed a veteran presence on the court while sophomore Casey Locker heated up.
“Somewhere in that fourth set, (Locker) got one kill and it turned into another kill, and you could just see it in her face, that she started to believe in her own skill,” Goldstein said. “That was the turning point.”
The Griffins squeezed out a 27-25 win in the fourth set to force the 15-point tiebreaker.
“It was scary but I knew that the person next to me had my back,” Bracali said. “I knew that she was going to cover me and that she believed in me. That’s how we got through it.”
Palumbo raced out to a 10-1 lead in the fifth set and finished off a 15-4 masterpiece — just like they trained for.
“It’s all because of the hard work,” said Truong. “It really came into effect. And that’s what brought us here today.”
Truong earned MVP honors for an incredible performance.
“Oh man, I did not think I would get that at all,” Truong said. “There are so many other amazing players on my team and they played great today. It was all of our contributions that brought us this win.”
For Leyla Hosendorf and fellow seniors Anayah Elican and Trinity Lewis, it was finally time to hold the elusive PPL trophy after three years of getting so close.
“It feels amazing on a completely different level,” Hosendorf said. “We worked really hard this season coming in with a basically whole new team. And with that new team, we just got better and better as time went on.”
It started with tough workouts in the preseason.
“We got tougher with each other as the season went along and we knew we had each other’s back,” Bracali said. “We knew as long as we trusted our training like our coach always says, we knew we could push through.”
