The WJ girls’ volleyball team defeated the Whitman Vikings on Friday, Nov. 1, winning 3-0 to advance to their first regional final in 12 years.

“We’ve played them a couple times this season but I think this was the best we’ve played against them,” senior outside hitter and captain Stella Lichter said. “We were running a pretty offensive game … and they couldn’t really pick anything up.”

After losing to the Richard Montgomery Rockets in the county championship game 3-0, in the second round of playoffs, the Cats quickly recovered to beat the Vikings in straight sets.

“The loss was a very good learning experience. You always learn more when you lose and I think we had some lessons that we brought back to the gym, and we worked really hard, talked about some of the problems we had, and they worked hard this week” head coach Jackie Krampf said.

With the win, the Wildcats are set to play Winston Churchill High School on Wednesday at home for a spot in the state quarterfinals. The Bulldogs narrowly advanced past the B-CC Barons 3-2 on Friday to reach the regional final.

The last time the Cats made a regional final, in 2012, they beat the undefeated Magruder Colonels to claim the championship and then advanced all the way to the state semifinals to face off with the eventual state champs, Sherwood High School.

Churchill has been the kryptonite of the Wildcats team over the past ten years, with six of the past ten Wildcats’ seasons having been ended by the Bulldogs. The Cats went nine years without a win against Churchill starting in 2015, before finally sweeping them earlier this season.

“I think we’ll prepare like we’ve prepared for all of our teams this year. We’ve gone one match at a time, we know that we have to do a better job defending; they have some excellent defensive specialists and they dig everything,” Krampf said. “We just need to make sure we play our game.”

The two teams will face off at WJ on Wednesday at 6:00 p.m.