The program at this weekend’s state finals will show Northville swept Hartland, 3-0, in the MHSAA boys volleyball Division 1 quarterfinal on Tuesday, June 2, at Novi High School.
But anyone who watched knows it was anything but a runaway win for the No. 7 Mustangs. They battled virtually point-for-point with the No. 8 Eagles, pulling out 25-19, 25-23 and 25-22 victories.
As one Northville dad sitting in the front row put it, the game “was a frickin’ heartattack” to watch.
Northville (32-7-1) advances to face Lake Orion in Friday’s state semifinal (6:30 p.m.) at Kellogg Arena in Battle Creek. The winner will meet Grand Haven or Macomb Dakota in Saturday’s championship match.
“I’m not going to lie: I held my breath during every single point,” said first-year coach Nyia Setla, a 2020 Northville graduate who played in the semifinals as a junior on the Mustangs’ 2018 girls volleyball team.
The second set was a back-and-forth affair. Northville’s Yuta Kikumori and Hartland’s Jacob Dibert traded kills until Julian Janisse came up with three timely plays to swing momentum in the Mustangs’ favor.
A Janisse kill tied the score at 19. Then a Hartland ball into the net gave Northville a one-point lead it wouldn’t relinquish. Janisse later teamed with Josh Vertrees for a block that put the Mustangs ahead, 22-20. Another Janisse kill and a thunderous slam by Subhash Bachu sealed the set.
“I just like to stay ready,” said Janisse, a fourth-year varsity player. “I trust my teammates, so I know if I fulfill my job and they fulfill their job, we’re going to win every game.”
Janisse stepped up again in the final set. The senior orchestrated a four-point serving run that included two aces and erased a two-point deficit. He also sparked another four-point run with a timely kill after a lengthy rally that featured back-to-back blocks by Northville’s Adam Piao.
Hartland fought back later in the set with four straight points, but Janisse ended that run with another kill. He stopped two more Eagles runs down the stretch and then finished the match with one final thunderous kill.
“Honestly, our setter [Jude Butler] does an amazing job of reversing the flow and providing one-on-one opportunities for Julian to score,” Setla said. “I also have to give a shoutout to our defense, too, but they put the ball in system so Julian can work it. When he [gets] those opportunities, he puts the ball away, and it’s really awesome to see.”
Janisse’s play was a little too much for Hartland (31-8) to overcome, which is saying something considering the Eagles took three sets from Northville during the regular season, including a 2-0 victory in a tri-match April 13.
“It was really unfortunate on how everything was falling,” Hartland co-coach Dallas Wimbrow said. “Sometimes you get these momentum killers that happen like a dub-bounce off the tape or somebody hitting into the net, but you’ve got to overcome them. You’ve got to be able to battle, and Northville battled and was the better team today.”
That’s not to say the Eagles didn’t play well. Dibert, Grant Pawlak and Kane Meyer came up with key kills while Jackson Seifer delivered several blocks.
The Mustangs simply had an answer for every Hartland run.
“That’s all about the bench for our team,” Janisse said. “The bench gets us super hyped, and it helps us be able to put down the ball after we might be looking a little down on the court from losing some points.”
Expect the Northville bench to come in handy again when the Mustangs arrive in Cereal City.
Sweeps look easy on paper, but this one was anything but. To reach the state championship, the Mustangs will likely need to survive more cardiac-challenging sets against No. 10 Lake Orion. But they’ve already proven they can handle those kinds of matches.
“We knew coming in here would be a point-for-point type of game,” Janisse said. “We’ve lost to them before. We just had to follow our game plan and trust that we’d eventually win. We just had to keep going, playing point-for-point.”
Brandon Folsom covers high school sports in metro Detroit for Hometown Life and the Detroit Free Press. Follow him on his new X.com account at @folsomwrites.
This article originally appeared on Hometownlife.com: MHSAA boys volleyball: Northville sweeps Hartland for semifinal berth
Reporting by Brandon Folsom, Hometownlife.com / Hometownlife.com
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