For 42 years, a lone volleyball championship banner has hung in the rafters of Orem High School, and now it will get another to match.
It hasn’t been an easy ride for Orem, which nearly lost in the 4A quarterfinals to Cedar, but the Tigers have made the best of their situation and dominated the 4A championship match against Green Canyon Thursday night, 25-14, 25-12 and 25-23.
Orem was surgical to open the match, only allowing 26 combined points in the opening two sets. The Tigers’ success largely came from their strong serving game, where they recorded 13 aces.
Nobody had more aces than Orem libero Scarlett Page, who had four while headlining the strong Tiger defense.
“In preparation, I always go around and tell the people that I know and love what I’m going to do today,” said Page.
“Just warming up, I just have in my mind imagining me getting great passes, aces, great digs and reading every single one of the hitters. I saw my coach was giving me what area to serve, and I focused on that. I just had that number in my head the whole time.”
In what seemed like the blink of an eye Orem led Green Canyon two sets to none, but the Tigers met some resistance in the third set as Green Canyon woke up and took Orem down to the wire.
But Sami Blackett came up big for the Tigers in the final set, recording seven kills, two aces and one block to clinch Orem’s first state volleyball title since 1981.
“I was kind of just doing my thing,” said Blackett. “I was up there, just no worries about it, I was just doing it.”
Blackett is one of three seniors on the relatively young Orem team and helped her team get in the proper headspace for Thursday’s match.
“I just said that we’ve worked all season for this, and this is what we wanted,” said Blackett. “We’ve had this for our goals the entire season, and so the fact that we made it here, we didn’t want to let up and lose this game, so this was a big one for us.”
Orem head coach Bill Sefita said a lot of trust had to come from his young team to succeed.
“I think it takes trust for the seniors to trust the freshmen, freshmen to trust sophomores, just kind of like it’s like a four-way street for everybody to trust each other,” said Sefita.
“I told them that this was something that we’ve been working hard for all year. It’s just prepping ourselves that we got to push hard towards the end and tell the seniors that we get to write our own history.”
Orem’s trust will be rewarded with its second-ever volleyball championship banner in school history, Sefita said. That’s something that has been on his players’ minds.
“The banner in our fieldhouse is 1981,” Sefita said, “so it’s been that long and it’s time for us to take it.”