COEUR d’ALENE — When volleyball matches get tight, some teams resort to chipping and tipping and sending other soft stuff over the net.

The Coeur d’Alene Vikings do not.

In fact, in those situations, they might hit even harder.

Cranking away on the ball across the front line — and sometimes from the back row — top-seeded Coeur d’Alene powered to a 25-20, 16-25, 25-18, 25-19 victory over the two-time defending state champion Lewiston Bengals in the 5A Region 1 championship match Tuesday night at Elmer Jordan Court.

“There’s no point in being tentative, when we can get a kill off of it,” explained Coeur d’Alene junior Megan Ramseyer, who totaled 19 kills, 21 assists and 11 digs. “And we have good enough defenders where, if we get blocked, we know we can get it up. We just have to keep being aggressive.”

Coeur d’Alene (18-3), winning its first regional title since 2008, advances to state for the first time since ’08. The state tournament runs Oct. 31-Nov. 1 in Idaho Falls.

Second-seeded Lewiston (28-3) plays host to third seed Lake City on Thursday in a loser-out match. The winner advances to a state play-in match Saturday in Grangeville against the fifth-place finisher from the District 3 tournament.

see VIKINGS, B2

Sophomore Ali Williams added 12 kills and 22 assists for Coeur d’Alene. Junior Missy Huddleston had 11 kills and seven digs, sophomore Sydney Bybee eight kills. Junior Maura Donovan had five of the Vikings’ 13 aces, and also had nine digs.

“My girls played great,” Coeur d’Alene coach Dee Pottenger said. “And Lewiston is a really strong team, so we had to earn our points to win that, which is a bonus on top of winning, and getting to go to state. My girls truly earned it.”

Coeur d’Alene and Lewiston split their two matches in 5A Inland Empire League play. Coeur d’Alene beat Lewiston at home in five games back on Oct. 2. In both matches, Lewiston won the first two games.

“Our focus tonight was to take care of business in Game 1 or 2, ” Pottenger said. “Our focus, first and foremost, was that first game, so it doesn’t need to go five.”

On Tuesday night, Coeur d’Alene went on a 10-1 run in the middle of the first game to take control at 17-11. Lewiston had a nice blocking game in the second game en route to a dominant 25-16 victory.

In the third game, Bybee cranked a kill on a slide play behind the setter, then won a joust at the net for a 19-15 Coeur d’Alene lead. On game point, Huddleston dug up a smash by Emilee Schlader, the league’s reigning MVP, and that led to a resounding kill from the outside by Ramseyer for a 25-18 win and a 2-1 lead in the match.

“We’ve played that well on quite a few occasions, actually,” Pottenger said. “Both times we played Lewiston, they were similar matches. But we knew we were going to have to play at that level to beat them; they weren’t going to give us points, we were going to have to earn every point. My girls are still showing more maturity; my younger sophomores are scoring more points for us, which is making a difference.”

In the fourth game, Donovan had three of her aces in a 6-0 run that put the Vikings up 15-9. Huddleston sent back an overfeed on serve-receive for a kill during that run, and Williams added a kill from the right side.

On match point Ramseyer, who last week gave a verbal commitment to play volleyball at Idaho in 2016, dropped to her knees for a quick set to Huddleston, who smashed a kill from the middle to win the match.

“We’d been talking a lot in practice about starting strong from the start,” Ramseyer said. “We had the momentum going, and we knew we could do it. After we lost that set, we just came together and said that we realized that our attitudes had gone down a little bit, and we just brought it back up, and that helped us a lot.”

Schlader led Lewiston with 14 kills and 18 digs, and Brett Hastings had 12 kills and five blocks. Makayla Wilson had 17 assists, Talaynia Hobart 14 assists.

“Coeur d’Alene played well; you can’t take anything away from them,” Lewiston coach Kelly Harwick said. “They played well.”