Spiketacular Recap

Nicky Widdis, Reporter

West Anchorage High School hosted the annual Spiketacular Volleyball Tournament on September 16th and 17th, and although our team didn’t end up on top, this long-standing tournament was full of excitement and action. The Eagles took home third place out of 21, a great way to mark the halfway point of the volleyball season.

The Spiketacular is the largest volleyball tournament in Alaska, and the only state-wide tournament. “The overall goal [of Spiketacular] is to bring all levels of volleyball into one location,” says West High volleyball’s head coach, Jaige Gerig. Though the exact start of the tournament is still unknown Spiketacular, “has been estimated to be about 25 years old,” Gerig says.

The West Anchorage High School Booster Club is responsible for arranging the tournament. “We start [preparing] the minute the teams are formed,” says Jennifer Mattingly, one of the lead organizers of the event. All the members of the Booster Club are volunteers, mostly family members of players who help set up the tournament and provide food. West’s National Honors Society also helped out this year. The Booster Club’s jobs before and during the tournament include getting sponsorships, creating advertisements, banners, and producing the Spiketacular booklet. “For every hour we’ve got 12 people on staff,” says Mattingly. West’s JV and C volleyball teams also work the tournament as court officials.

On the first day of the tournament, teams were divided into three pool-play brackets. The number of sets that a team won determined their placement in one of the three brackets for the second day: Gold, Silver, or Bronze. The pool-play matches consisted of two sets to 25, though the strict 50-minute time allotment for each game sometimes cut the second set short. On the second day, teams played in single elimination bracket play with a consolation bracket for the teams eliminated in the first round.

This year’s winners were Dimond High School for the Gold Bracket, Wasilla High School for Silver, and East Anchorage High School for Bronze. After a thrilling game against Dimond, West lost to Dimond in the Gold Semifinals.