BELOIT — A year ago, the Canfield Cardinals volleyball team was playing in Division I.

This year, a bump down to Division II has them playing for a district title as they swept the Salem Quakers 3-0 at West Branch High School Wednesday night.

For the past two years, Salem was the Division III district champs. This year they moved up to Division II and ran into those Cardinals.

Grace Mangapora led Canfield (18-5) with 14 kills as the Cardinals’ height caused the Quakers (19-6) some issues in that opening set. Canfield took the opener, 25-13.

Though, Salem responded jumping out to 5-0 and 10-5 leads. Canfield coach Maria Householder called a timeout with her team down 8-3.

“When I took the timeout, they knew that most of the points that Salem scored were our mistakes,” Householder said. “That’s the one thing we’ve been working on all season. If they’re going to score a point, make them earn it. I think it just ticked my girls off. We want to earn our points. We don’t want to give away points. It was a matter of now doing our job.”

Canfield responded by chipping away the lead to where Salem called a timeout, now trailing 12-11. The Quakers were having better success hitting balls at the Cardinals’ backline to build out that early lead.

“We were smarter about it,” Salem coach Sarah Hamilton said. “Defensively, in that first set, we couldn’t get the ball anywhere where we needed to get it. In the second set, we picked up that they were covering up on our tips because we couldn’t get a set or hittable ball. We ended up pushing it deep and capitalizing on it a little bit. At the end day, we couldn’t pick up our defense enough to block or pick up digs.”

That presented issues for the Quakers as they saw Canfield take the second set 25-16.

Jenna Delisio has 16 assists while Riley Kinkade added 15 digs for the Cardinals.

“Our confidence has grown from about halfway through the season,” Householder said. “We took a loss that we shouldn’t have taken. We turned it around and pretty much said we’re not going to let that happen anymore. Our confidence was high coming in. Again with volleyball, anything can happen. I tell them every day that there is a fine line between confidence and being cocky. We don’t want to underestimate the other side.”

In the third set, the Quakers stayed even throughout, but after falling behind 18-16, the Cardinals built out their advantage to 24-18 and eventually took the third set 25-21.

“We’re the smallest D-III school competing against the largest school,” Hamilton said. “It makes it tough to be the little guys, but I couldn’t be more proud of my girls. We graduated six seniors last year. We had our player of the year Echo (Mayer-Kutz) who was out this year. We lost our outside hitter in the middle of the season. So far us to turn out a 19-5 season, I was super proud of the girls.

“We had big shoes to fill because we only had one true starter returning,” she added. “These seniors and those girls filled those shoes beyond belief. I couldn’t be more proud of the perseverance they had.”

Canfield will play top seed Marlington on Saturday. The Dukes eliminated Canal Fulton NW in three sets.

“We’ve been scouting them,” Householder said. “We’ve got some film on them. We’re ready for them. Marlington is big in this area. We’re kind of the newcomers coming down to Division II. I think we’re going to have pretty full stands. We’ll have to figure out how to get over that.

“They want us. I know that. We’ve gotten some good looks at them over the last week. They don’t have a ton of height, so I think we need to take advantage of that. We’ve got some big jumpers. We have a lot more weapons to use. It’s looking positive. I just hope we do our job.”