In February 2012, the Trend Setters made history again when they traveled to Sacramento for the first of four Area League Tournaments and returned home with a first-place finish.
Within the next month, the team traveled to Manogue High School and to Stockton, Calif., to capture two more first place-finishes.
In mid-April the Trend Setters joined 150 other teams in the 14-year-old division at the Far Western National Qualifier event held at the Reno-Sparks Convention Center. During three days of high-level competition in a surreal environment, the team finished with a record of 5-3. They returned to Winnemucca with an inspired vision about the game of volleyball and a passion to keep working.
In early May, the team traveled to Spanish Springs High School to close out league play with a third-place finish.
The story of the 2012 Trend Setters volleyball season, however, was not yet complete. The final chapter would be written this past Saturday and Sunday at the Area League Regional Championships in Sacramento, Calif.
After two rounds of pool play and a record of 3-2, the Trend Setters went into bracketed play as the No. 6 seed out of six teams that were still in the running for the championship.
They would have to win three straight matches to emerge in first place. In the first round of play, the Trend Setters beat a Northern Nevada Juniors team in two sets. In the second round of play, they faced a different Northern Nevada Juniors team that had defeated the Trend Setters earlier in the day in a three-set battle.
The Trend Setters were seeking revenge and coach Mary Kay Ports challenged them to rise to the occasion; to leave no doubt that they belonged in the championship match. She assured them that the opponent was not going to give the match away, but that the girls needed to fight for every point.
The Northern Nevada Juniors saw the best that the Trend Setters had to offer on Sunday afternoon and it was enough to put the Trend Setters into the final game of the day.
The championship match was a contest between the undisputed two best teams in the tournament. The Trend Setters faced Yuba Sutter Blue from Yuba City, Calif. The Yuba Sutter team had not lost an Area League event all season long and had scored a win against the Trend Setters in the very first round of pool play on the previous day.
Once again, the Trend Setters were motivated to redeem themselves from the earlier loss. Yuba Sutter Blue took the first set of the match and was up 13-5 in the second set, before the Trend Setters decided to write their own ending to the 2012 story.
Ports recalls feeling the momentum shift to her side at 13-10. Then Yuba Sutter went on another run to make it 17-10. When the deficit loomed almost insurmountable, the Trend Setters went on their first big scoring run. Behind some remarkable serving, hitting, digging and scrappy hustle plays, they tied the score at 17-17 and eventually completed the comeback to win the second set, which forced a third and final set.
The third set was an impressive back and forth contest for both teams from beginning to end. After a grueling eight hours of play that day in a facility that reached nearly 100 degrees indoors, heroic performances on both sides of the net resulted in the epic battle that defines championship contests and, ultimately, champions. In a final set score of 15-12, the Trend Setters made history one more time by emerging as the undisputed 2012 Area League Regional Champions.
The Trend Setters team includes coach Ports, Lindsay Pate, Ashlee Barron, Jillian Albright, Brooklyn Waller, Hannah Hillyer, Payton Naveran, Juliana Velasco, Darion Iturriaga and Jadyn Eastman.
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