FRANKFORT — Sometime next year, Crown Point senior Reece Kral will play in her first college match at Worthen Arena on the campus of Ball State in Muncie.
Her final high school match is going to be at the same place next Saturday.
“It means so much to me that I’m able to make it back there,” Kral said. “I’m glad that I have a team that could help me reach that goal.”
In a pivotal Game 3, Crown Point’s 6-foot-1 right side hitter delivered the winning points with a block and a kill in the Class 4A Frankfort Semistate match against Yorktown.
A victory in Game 4 gave Crown Point its second straight semistate title, 26-24, 16-25, 29-27, 25-19.
Crown Point will face Avon (36-3) next Saturday for the Class 4A state championship. It will start at approximately 4 p.m. Central time, following the Class 3A final.
Yorktown (36-3), the defending Class 3A state champions, moved to 4A this season based on the success factor. But Crown Point (35-3) recovered from a slow start, earning a chance to improve on its Class 4A runner-up finish last season.
“This is the most stressed I’ve ever been,” Crown Point coach Alison Duncan said while holding a hand to her forehead. “We were a little tight. We weren’t talking a whole lot. Ultimately, we recovered and started blocking and doing what we needed to do.”
Duncan called Crown Point’s Game 1 victory “a gift.”
“We did not play well enough in that game to win it,” she said. “But we got some lucky breaks.”
Yorktown dominated the second game and took an 18-11 lead in the third game before Crown Point rallied. The Bulldogs broke a 23-23 deadlock on a Peyton Yelich kill, but Yorktown tied the score at 24.
Then Crown Point got another point. And Yorktown tied the score again.
“They know what it feels like to win a state title,” senior setter Alex Equihua said. “We’re fighting for that feeling. We all want that second chance.”
Then Crown Point got another point. And Yorktown tied the score yet again.
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“I really felt we were going to win that one,” Duncan said. “Anytime it’s close, my team has always pulled it out, up to this point.”
Crown Point had five chances to end Game 3 before one of Kral’s 13 kills finally ended it in the Bulldogs’ favor.
“After we came back in that third set, we realized how much more we could do,” said senior outside hitter Morgan Chacon, who had 27 kills. “We knew if we finished that fourth set, we’d be done.”
And Crown Point did just that, jumping out to a 13-9 lead and never looking back in clinching the semistate title.
Both Chacon and Equihua credited their calm demeanor in the intense environment to Crown Point softball coach Pete Iussig, who addressed the team last week.
“One of his quotes was: ‘If you can keep your head while everyone else is losing theirs, you’ll have success,'” Equihua said. “That’s all we were thinking about: worrying about our side of the net.”
Dave Melton is a freelance reporter for the Post-Tribune.