Liam Hamm is an ASU Cronkite School of Journalism student assigned to cover Gilbert Classical Academy for AZPreps365.com

Senior Night didn’t go as planned for the Gilbert Classical Academy Spartans as they were swept during their final home match of the season by the St. John Paul II Catholic Lions in three sets, 25-16, 25-20, 25-13. 

SJPIIC’s record climbed to 16-6 and 7-1 in their last eight matches. Meanwhile, the Spartans started their season with an impressive 9-2 record, but they’ve since won just two of their last six games, which gives them a record of 11-6.

“A lot of [the loss] had to do with [coming back] after fall break, like I’ve been seeing it a lot and some of them are not connected on the court,” Spartans head coach Janie Tomasek said after the match. “When we lost to Miami the first time, we had a big team meeting to try to bring us all back together.

"We did a little better the next match, but they just get scared when they see tall, big girls. When they see it, they get nervous, and I thought there were some players on the team who could have played a lot better.”

These teams were both highly ranked in the 2A Conference, and the Lions entered this game with a marginally better win percentage than the Spartans, despite having five more wins than GCA. 

“We wanted to play our best, we know they’re ranked No. 7 and meanwhile we’re ranked No. 18, but we still wanted to give it our all, play our best game because it’s our last home game, you know? We wanted to play our best,” said senior Madeleine Matthews, who has been a crucial member of their program for three years.

“I think we were all into Friday night, we gave it our all but I think we could’ve done a little bit better, but I think we played the best we could.”

SJPIIC outplayed GCA in every set, as it made less defensive errors like a missed return or unblocked kill attempt and more offensive errors such as serves that land out-of-bounds or a lack of verbal communication. 

During the third set, the Spartans managed an early 9-6 lead before collapsing and allowing 10 consecutive points, which created a lead for the Lions that was insurmountable for GCA.

Although the Spartans were swept, seniors Taylor Perry, Evgenia “Jenny” Tsiranidou, and the previously mentioned Matthews had excellent closing games in front of their home crowd. Perry, in particular, had multiple momentum-shifting blocks to attempt to keep her squad competitive in the match.

“[Senior Night] was so exciting," Perry said. "This is my first ever Senior Night as part of an athletic team before, so that was so much fun… I definitely had to bring a lot of energy. We checked out the team before and were like ‘Oh, they’re pretty high up in the ranks’, so we just wanted to stay positive throughout all of it, no matter what happened. So I was there just bringing energy.” 

GCA closes out its regular season with an away match against San Tan Charter (23-4) at 6 p.m. on Monday.