Poland walked away with a 3-1 victory, and for senior Lauren Melillo, the Bulldogs did something that hadn’t ben done during her varsity career.

“It feels really good,” she said, “mostly because in all my other years playing, we’ve never made it past the first round of tournament, so it’s really exciting for us to move on.

“We are more together. Last year, there was some rifts in the team, and it just didn’t seem like we played together, but this year we’re flowing more and we’re gelling better.”

She felt her team played well around her, too.

Correspondent photo / Robert Hayes Le’ayshia Corinaldi of Struthers sets the ball during her team’s 3-0 loss to Northwest at West Branch High School in Beloit.

“I’m really nothing without all of them,” she said, “but I try to just stay clean and not do anything crazy.”

Poland coach Martina DiNello is happy to have a first-round victory.

“These girls deserve it,” he said. “They’ve been working hard for that, and they got the consistency these last two years, and they really showed what they can do.”

The Bulldogs last playoff victory came in 2016 when Poland defeated Ravenna 3-0 in the sectional round of the tournament.

After going up 2-0 in the match (25-18, 25-8), Poland faced some adversity in the third set by trailing 9-2 early on and lost a closely contested set by a score of 26-24.

DiNello knew what to tell her team after dropping the third set.

“We (needed) to pick up our communication and our moving,” she said. “And we just got to put the ball away.”

They responded by taking the fourth set by a score of 25-11 to complete the 3-1 win.

Poland (11-12) earned itself the opportunity to play second-seeded Canfield on Saturday, a team they lost to 3-0 earlier this season.

DiNello respects the matchup.

“We did see them during the season,” DiNello said, “and they’re a very established competitive team, so we’re going to go out there and play our best, and hope for the best.

“We’re definitely going to work on serving and blocking because I feel like if we could kinda shut them down from that angle that we would have the best chance.”

Melillo finished with a team-high 18 kills and is ready for the rematch with the Cardinals.

“We’re going to have really tough practices because last time we played Canfield it wasn’t our best, so we’re ready to have a second try, and we’re all really excited.”

Earlier in the evening at West Branch, the Struthers Wildcats lost 3-0 (25-12, 25-12, 25-10) to the Northwestern Indians out of Canal Fulton.

Struthers ended their season with a record of 3-20, but first-year coach Millie Manning sees some positives to build off of going into next season.

“This is my first year coaching varsity for this team, and we’ve struggled all season with consistency, with being able to gel as a team, and so that is something that’ll I’ll definitely be focusing on in the future,” Manning said. “On a positive note, we did bring the record up from them only winning one game last year, winning three, and two out of those three games were conference games (Jefferson and Niles McKinley), so there is a positive note there considering the Northeast 8 is a pretty strong conference.

“So, we’ll look to the future to see what we can do to build the program,” she added, “because I think that’s what my focus right now as the head coach is to build the program, and see if we can get some girls to play in the off season as well, and gel as a team and build the whole program as a whole.”

The Wildcats graduate four seniors, and Manning appreciates her time spent with them despite only being their head coach for one season.

“It was a pleasure to play them this year, they were willing to learn,” she said. “This was actually the first year that the seniors actually played on varsity.

“So in the past they were never really (letterwinners), I really didn’t have many letterwinners from the senior squad, so to have them on the team this year, they were willing to learn and willing to take the place of anyone who played in the past.”