Volleyball: Cougars Fall to Chargers in District Final

The Concorde District volleyball title remains elusive for the Oakton High Cougars, who lost in the final game Thursday to Chantilly High, hosted at Centreville High.

The Chargers started out with two straight set wins — 25-23 and 25-20 — but with Oakton's propensity for come-from-behind wins this season, it was still anyone's game.

When Chantilly and Oakton met earlier in the season, the Cougars came back from a first-set loss to win three-straight sets for the program's first win over Chantilly in school history.

Then the Cougars kept the Chargers on their toes, winning the third set 25-18. The set stayed tight, with the Chargers ahead most of the time, but the Cougars won 10-straight points after trailing 16-12 to put the score at 22-16. The Chargers couldn't recover and the Cougars forced a fourth set.

"I'm very proud of them. This wasn't a bad performance at all. We've still broken all sorts of records in terms of Oakton's program this season," Coach Steve Drumm said. "We would've liked that title, though. It was our goal all season long."

But the Chargers returned the favor with a dominant performance in the fourth set, which also saw a 10-point run, but this time from the Chargers. The Chargers won the set 25-10, taking the 2011 Concorde District title.

Both the Chargers and the Cougars have qualified for the Northern Region tournament, which begins Monday. Both teams will have home-court advantage.

Drumm believes his team is resilient enough to recover from this loss to put up a tough fight in the first round of the region tournament next week.

"We've never made it out of the first round of regions, and we've only gone to the region tournament four times," Drumm said. "But we've done a lot of things this season we've never done before, so I think we can make it out of the first round of regions this year."