AIKEN -- South Aiken's volleyball team knew it had multiple match points in hand Thursday night against Gray Collegiate.
Sophia Premo's ace was South Aiken's fourth consecutive point and made it 14-10 in the first-to-15 deciding fifth set, meaning a Gray Collegiate kill on the next point wasn't going to doom the T-Breds.
The War Eagles' serve that followed, though, found the back line for an ace and quickly heightened the tension inside the South Aiken gym.
How could it not? The War Eagles, having only dropped four sets overall while running up an 11-0 record in Region 4-AAAA, had already overcome deficits to win sets two and three, forcing the T-Breds to have to rally in the fourth just to force a fifth.
South Aiken had to regroup, and fast, in time for the incoming serve. The T-Breds played the ball cleanly when it was on their side of the net -- the War Eagles did not. A ball-handling error against Gray Collegiate gave South Aiken the clinching point it needed, creating a tie for first place in the region standings heading into the final week of the regular season.
"I'm out of breath. That's how excited I am for this match and this victory," said South Aiken head coach Cassie Mckie, and understandably so following her team's 25-23, 18-25, 20-25, 25-23, 15-12 win. "They just fought hard, and I'm just so proud of them."
That Gray Collegiate ace to make it 14-12 in the fifth set could've been the moment the T-Breds tightened up, fallen back on their heels and let it turn into a 14-16 loss that would've been a heartbreaking way to see their region championship hopes dashed. Instead, they finished.
Finishing wasn't so easy to do in the middle sets. Back-to-back kills by Marlena Lee and Braislyn Newby broke a 23-all tie for a first-set win, but Gray Collegiate closed the second on a 9-2 run and the third on a 6-1 burst after overcoming a 14-8 deficit to put the War Eagles on the verge of finishing off a regular-season sweep of the T-Breds.
"Right there, those are lessons learned," Mckie said. "That is where some of those young, inexperienced sophomores in those big moments, we start to get panicked and chaotic. And that is where we're not getting control back, calming it back down and doing what we do best. We don't play great in chaos. No one does. We want to play disciplined, and we want to play with what we do well."
South Aiken got back to that in the fourth set, leading steadily throughout and then forcing Gray Collegiate into back-to-back errors followed by a combo block and a kill by freshman Emerson Swift for a 21-17 lead. Junior setter Malia Pemberton, who earlier in the match recorded her 1,000th career assist, and Newby provided back-to-back kills to close out the set, setting up the sprint to the finish.
Lee, Pemberton and Newby provided the early points for a 5-2 lead in the fifth, and a big swing from Premo put South Aiken back in front 10-9 after Gray had briefly taken the lead. Swift delivered another clutch kill, followed by a Lee block and then the Premo ace that gave the T-Breds match point.
Mckie praised her team's passing, pointing out that the T-Breds struggled in that department in their five-set loss to the War Eagles on Sept. 16. They also didn't have Newby that night, and this time around South Aiken's senior opposite hitter contributed 16 kills and three blocks.
"She helped us tremendously tonight," Mckie said. "She had 16 kills with only three errors and was stuff-blocking the mess out of them. She's a quiet player. Not too much riles her up. For her to really come in and get the job done allowed everybody else to kind of breathe a little bit."
Sophomore outside hitter Aubrey Boyd had another big night offensively with 10 kills and four aces, senior middle blocker Lee had 15 kills, 16 digs and five blocks, Pemberton had 36 assists and 15 digs with some timely dump-shot kills in the fifth set when Gray Collegiate was keying in on Lee and Newby, and sophomore libero Kendall Doolittle had 19 digs.
South Aiken's win puts the T-Breds in a tie with the War Eagles for first place in Region 4-AAAA, with their final two games set for Oct. 14 at home against Midland Valley and Oct. 16 across town at rival Aiken High.
Mckie told her players before first serve how proud she is of them, win or lose, and told them she just wanted Thursday night to be a dogfight. She asked her players to give everything they have, to not watch balls hit the floor, to play with heart and love and passion for the game. She told them she knew they could compete with the War Eagles -- and beat them -- and a team that has struggled at times with self-confidence gave itself plenty of reason to have faith heading into the most important stretch of the season.
"No one has beaten Gray. There's only a couple of teams that have even taken a set from them," she said. "For them to see that they can beat a very, very high-caliber team, then we can start understanding what an amazing team we are. That's what I said in the end there. I said, 'I wish you guys would just believe in yourselves, what I see in you.' I have high standards for them, because I know what they're capable of and I know the beasts that they can be."