PERU – Homestead’s run in the inaugural IHSAA boys volleyball state tournament came to an end on Saturday evening as the Spartans fell to Fishers 3-0 in the Peru Regional championship match, 25-16, 25-19, 25-22.
“This is a tough game. The team across the net is a strong team,” Homestead coach Jacob Allred said. “I think they recognized how much we’ve progressed in the last three years. We played Fishers two years ago, and it was not even close. This year, we played them (twice), and we were neck-and-neck with them the entire time.”
The Spartans (30-6), who beat Carroll in the semifinals earlier Saturday, appeared to suffer from some championship jitters in the early moments of the title game. Tigers senior JT Guler served up an ace on the first point of the match and Fishers took a 5-0 lead before Homestead called timeout. The Spartans quickly settled in after the early break and cut the deficit to 10-7, but they never pulled any closer in the first set.
“Offensively, we were really strong,” Allred said. “We were tooling the block really well, we were finding our way around the block. Defensively, we were doing strong things as well. We were blocking some of their tall players, we were digging a lot of really strong hits.
“I think the thing that really held us back is that we would build momentum, and then we would miss a serve, so that we would drop back down to where we started. They did a great job of scoring points, but building momentum was hard for us today.”
Fishers led, though narrowly, for much of the second and third sets.
“I think we fought hard. It’s a great group of guys, and I’m super lucky to be able to fight alongside them,” senior setter Jesse Biedenbach said. “We put it all out there, it didn’t go our way.”
Fishers (31-4) is one of four teams to lift a regional trophy in boys volleyball’s first year as a fully-sanctioned IHSAA sport. The Tigers will play Roncalli (28-3) in one state finals semifinal next Saturday at Purdue’s Mackey Arena while Lake Central (29-6) and Cathedral (30-5) will play in the other. The inaugural state championship will be played at 6 p.m. next Saturday.
“It was awesome to be able to kickstart this. We had the non-sanctioned years the past two years and lost in the first round of regionals,” Biedenbach said. “It was super fun to be able to win one, especially the first year of it being sanctioned. It’s tough to see the trophy being handed to the other team, but they played well and they earned it.”
Homestead and Carroll (26-8) split two five-set matches during the regular season, and Saturday’s semifinal was similarly tightly contested with the Spartans winning 3-1 (25-22, 25-18, 23-25, 25-23).
“Every time we play Carroll, it’s always an intense matchup,” Allred said. “Being rivals, it’s always a mental battle. But a lot of the guys on our team know a lot of the guys on their team, so it’s really cool to see them be competitive with each other but also support each other, especially this late in the season, and respect each other’s growth across the season.”
Although Homestead’s season ended without lifting another trophy, Allred said he saw enormous growth from the program this spring. The Spartans won tournaments at Columbia City, Noblesville and Lawrence North as well as the South Side Sectional.
“We have a ton to be proud of across the season. We won a lot of really tough matchups,” Allred said. “They grew a ton across the season, and the things we were working on in practice they really tried to implement. They were great stewards of the sport and they all grew into incredible men.”
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