Glacier dreaming big

They're dreaming big now.

The Glacier Wolfpack (10-2) volleyball team recently wrapped the regular season with the Western AA conference championship.

Glacier begins the Class AA state tournament at 2 p.m. today against the No. 4 Eastern AA seed, Billings Skyview.

What's odd about that? Not a thing.

Except ...

This is the first Wolfpack volleyball team to win the Western AA regular season title.

Now team members are hoping to become the first Glacier squad to win a match at the state tournament.

At the first volleyball practices in August, nobody thought the Wolfpack would wind up as Western AA's No. 1 seed with the automatic bid to state - not the Wolfpack team members or even the Glacier coaching staff.

"At the beginning of the season, we were all thinking ... fourth, third," said senior libero Cami Mathison.

Helena High was the odds-on favorite to win the conference for a second straight year. The Bengals had the big middle hitter, the setter, the longtime coach ... everything it seemed they needed.

The Wolfpack had a lot returnees - from a team that finished the regular season fifth in Western AA then lost a playoff match at Missoula Sentinel.

"I had a lot of the same kids returning with a sub .500 season. I had young middles, two brand new kids (Cassidy Hashley and Tiffany Marks). The expectation is you will be better, but I didn't expect top when we were coming from the lower half," said Wolfpack coach Christy Harkins.

Her honest expectation was the Wolfpack would finish middle of the conference and host a playoff.

"But these kids are very competitive. They're gamers. We have good, solid, consistent practices. But they really know how to step it up in matches.

"They compete better in matches - and once we learned that, that helped me figure out how to plan," the coach said.

The season started off well enough - a pair of wins over CMR and Great Falls, followed by a victory over Hellgate - and then a 5-set nailbiting victory over Flathead at the first crosstown match.

The Wolfpack had never beaten Flathead at Glacier before.

"That was a huge goal to these guys," Harkins said.

But they followed that with a 5-set loss to Helena High two days later.

"We were pretty intimidated (in that match)," said setter Paige Latimer.

It wasn't until midseason before it occurred to the Wolfpack that "we can do it. We can be No. 1," said senior outside hitter Rachel Cutler.

"It's a reality now, now just a dream. We are coming together as a team," she smiled.

"We really meshed together as a team as the season went on," agreed Latimer.

"We started to learn who we are as a team, who we are standing by, how they play," Mathison said.

"And we learned to trust each other," Cutler said.

And by the time they faced Helena again on Oct. 21, they had learned more of the Bengal tendencies and "realized we could beat them," Cutler said.

"We were that close. We knew we could beat them," Latimer said.

They dropped the first two sets of that one, bounced back to get the third and fourth sets - and then powered through the fifth set, 15-11.

"We just keep going. Every time we play, we play to do better than we played last time," Cutler said.

As for today's match with Skyview ... Harkins says she just needs to figure out how to beat the Glacier Wolfpack.

Other coaches in describing the Falcons have told Harkins "‘they're a lot like you.'"

The description of Skyview is "athletic, strong tradition in great defense, two middles who show up as big blockers and a dominant outside. Scrappy passers and big blockers, you expect great defense," Harkins said.

If Glacier wins, it will play the winner of Missoula Sentinel-Billings Senior at 8 p.m. on Thursday. If it losers, it plays the loser of that match at 2 p.m. on Friday.