“We were so motivated (for these matches with them),” said Oakland Christian’s Sofie Williams, who had a team-high 14 kills. “They’re not one of our total rivals, but we said we need to beat them because we’ve lost to them in the past. We’ve always come out so strong against them and we just have that (desire) inside us to beat them and play hard.”<\/p>\n
It came with a little luck, including a ball that rolled over the net and one that hit fortuitously off the ceiling, but the Lancers built a six-point lead early on in the opening set. Lutheran Northwest would scratch back and make it 20-15, but the hosts came away with all but one of the last six points to go up a set.<\/p>\n
The Crusaders responded with a 3-1 start to the second, but it tipped in the favor of Oakland Christian, who after going up 11-6 never led by any less than a handful, and the tandem of Norah Walkenhorst and Sutton Stockman (12 kills) finished things off to go up 2-0.<\/p>\n
![\"Volleyball](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/10\/TOP-L-LNWOaklandChristianVB-101526-02.jpg\")
Lutheran Northwest’s Eva Hauss (5) attempts to hit around a pair of Oakland Christian blockers during Thursday night’s three-set loss to the Lancers. (BRYAN EVERSON – MediaNews Group)<\/p>\n
Lutheran Northwest (12-14-2) again took an early lead in the third, and even when the Crusaders fell behind late, 19-16, they reeled off three in a row, including an ace by Sophia Martens, to tie the set. But a spike by Williams restored Oakland Christian’s lead, and despite the Crusaders staving off the match point three consecutive times, Sophia Parrish set up Stockman for the match-winning kill.<\/p>\n
The Lancers piled up 17 aces in the win, particularly in the first two sets when their serves were extremely sharp. A team-high six were by Williams, followed by five from Walkenhorst and four by Parrish.<\/p>\n
“I think the serving was exactly what I wanted it to be and hope that it is every game,” Franklin said. “It’s something that we’ve really worked on. I think our setter Sophia ran a really good offense and moved the ball around, and every one of our hitters was on and connecting, so when we did get the opportunity to run the offense, it went really well. I think we hit very much in the positive and were successful all the way across the net.”<\/p>\n
Parrish racked up 32 assists and All Brock finished with 17 digs.<\/p>\n
Crusaders head coach Sabrina Lauinger didn’t necessarily feel her team fell short, but credited the Lancers for coming out of the gate strong. “They didn’t have a ton of errors, they just played a great game,” she said. “Our hitters weren’t executing like they normally do. The servicing was better than I anticipated going in, but they’ve got great players, great servers (who make) tough serves), and they can really put it down. I was proud of the way we came out the third set and we gave them a little more fight.”<\/p>\n
Last year’s win in the district title allowed the Crusaders to make a run to the state quarterfinals, but they’re still trying to make the right adjustments to try and make a deep run again this season.<\/p>\n
“We’re moving some stuff around with our rotation, working with a 6-2 or a 5-1, so just trying to find what’s right for us in the postseason is kind of where we’re at right now,” Lauinger said. “We lost four seniors from last year who had big roles, one of them playing D1 over in Illinois. We’ve got some great kids who came back, too, but we are a young team and have a couple freshmen playing, a couple juniors stepping into big roles, so we are working on rebuilding a little bit … We’re playing at Clawson for district, and hopefully should come out of there — we have the last five of six years — so fingers crossed for that, but it’s a young group, so anything can happen.”<\/p>\n
A league title is still possible for the Lancers (26-8-0). That should be decided with a trip to Plymouth Christian on Oct. 22. But going up against a number of big schools throughout the fall has helped them look like a bonified state contender at the D4 level.<\/p>\n
“I feel like (playing multiple bigger schools) really helped with our motivation,” Williams said. “Even though they’re D1 schools, we’ve still played so well against them. Being able to beat some of these D1 schools, it gives us that confidence … We’re hoping to win our conference and our region and go to states this year. I really think we can make it. Two years ago, we made the regional final and I think we can make it to state this year because we have an amazing team. Our record has shown it.”<\/p>\n
Added Franklin, “I think the fun thing about the tournament is that you never really know who you’re going to get next, because there’s always a Cinderella team and you don’t know who you’re going to see. There’s faceless teams we haven’t seen, teams like (No. 1) Adrian Lenawee and (No. 3) Battle Creek St. Philip, they’re always a challenge. There’s definitely teams on the other side of the state that are going to give us a good game. Which ones we see and in what order, we’ll see how it plays out.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"AUBURN HILLS \u2013 Games between Oakland Christian and Lutheran Northwest almost never get decided in the minimum required…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":497716,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[3443,2044,795,143,904,145,144,3414,127],"class_list":["post-497715","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-oakland","tag-auburn-hills","tag-high-school-sports","tag-michigan","tag-oakland","tag-oakland-county","tag-oakland-headlines","tag-oakland-news","tag-rochester-hills","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/497715","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=497715"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/497715\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/497716"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=497715"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=497715"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=497715"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}