High School Sports: Century Advances in Regional Volleyball

In a hard fought match, Century downed Liberty 3-2 to advance in Class 2A West region volleyball Monday evening.

The two teams met in the regular season with Century winning 3-0. The match is more than two rivals as the coaches are brother and sister.

It was noticed that Trumbo didn’t shake his sister’s hand before the match. Century coach Becky Groves said, "because he has been hugging me in the past and I have beaten him in the past, I think he was trying something different. So he said to me yesterday, don’t take it personal if I am not nice to you. I said I don’t."

The two squared off in front of a large and vocal crowd with Liberty taking the first two games, 25-19 and 25-17.  In the first game, Century led once, 1-0 and never led in the second game.

"Seniors look at each other. This is it. We don’t win, we go home for good. Your senior year is done. So make up your mind right now. They made up their mind,’’ said Groves when asked what she told the team after the first two games.

The Knights bounced back to take the next two games, both by the score of 25-22 setting up a fifth game.

Asked what she told the team before the fifth game, Groves said, "you’ve got to keep going. Each game, you have to win that game and move on to the next."

In the deciding game, Liberty scored first and built a 7-3 lead before the Knights started to chip away the lead. Century finally pulled even at 13 before winning the last two points and the match.

"We have played five, five game matches, they played zero," said Liberty coach Bryan Trumbo said after the match and over the roar of the home crowd. "They have no experience with this which is one thing with have experience with and they don’t. We had it in the bag, but My girls played great tonight. We gave em a great fight. We are 9-7 right now and sixth in the Baltimore Sun metro poll and we are better than them. We can beat those great teams and it just didn’t happen."

Century students stormed the court to mob the winning Knights.

When asked if the game would be replayed over Thanksgiving dinner, Groves said, "We don’t usually talk about volleyball because my mom hates it. It's such an intense topic, so we try to stay away from it."

Century will play Wednesday night against either Oakdale or Catoctin.