West Ranch holds off Valencia, clinches first league title in three years

VALENCIA — Plenty of nerves and a talented Valencia team stood in the way of the West Ranch boys volleyball team Wednesday night as it tried to capture the Foothill League championship.

Despite a new lineup and some anxiousness, the Wildcats defeated the visiting Vikings in four sets, 24-26, 25-18, 26-15, 28-26, to earn the program’s first Foothill title in three years.

West Ranch (21-4, 10-0) won with an adjusted rotation as the team celebrated senior night with a lineup that featured all 12 of its Class of 2025 players.

At the helm of the offense was setter Jackson Manansala, who moved the ball around to numerous hitters on his way to 38 assists.

“We were semi-anxious,” Manansala said. “It’s our last home game in league. I think that there was a lot of stress over it, and that kind of reflected in our play early on. But I’m very proud of our team just playing hard and getting the win.”

Doing most of the damage was senior outside hitter Noah Douphner, who tallied 20 kills, 10 digs and three blocks.

Douphner’s powerful serves and hits gave Valencia (17-6, 6-3) issues throughout the match but arguably his most important play was literally the opposite. After jump serving hard all night, the senior caught Valencia off guard by faking tying a shoe before he quickly underhand served the ball to where the Vikings weren’t paying attention, earning an ace to take set three.

“We practiced it all week. (Douphner) never made it once,” said West Ranch coach Brandon Johnson.

Valencia came within inches of taking control of the match, as two sets went to deuce, including the opening game which the Vikings won.

Valencia was better offensively and efficient in the first set, but plenty of self-inflicted errors led to a West Ranch lead for most of the first set. The Wildcats led 21-17 before a big serving run from Vikings outside hitter Jonathan Yun. The Valencia senior notched three aces in the first set, including back-to-back points that tied the score at 23-23. More West Ranch errors gave Valencia the opening set but from there on, the Wildcats were locked in.

Yun made another huge impact in the fourth set when he added seven of his team-high 14 kills.

The Vikings trailed 24-20 and needed a miracle to extend the fourth game. Junior setter Jacob Fernandez came in to serve and smoothly led a 4-0 run to force another deuce.

Both teams exchanged blows with multiple long rallies in the deuce but West Ranch outside hitter Logan Sanchez ended the night with a kill from a Valencia overpass of a tough Douphner serve.

“They know us and we know them,” Johnson said of the crosstown rival Vikings. “There’s not much else to say besides that. They have terrific players. They all play club with my boys. We play club with them. And so it’s just about executing and having a game plan and sticking to it.

“But more than anything, tonight was about finishing sets, which we didn’t quite do as well as I would have liked to, but we found enough tonight. And sometimes, enough is enough.”

Sanchez and middle blocker Lucas Fico added eight kills each for the Wildcats.

Leo Sangthongkum added eight kills for the Vikings.

The win was West Ranch’s third straight over Valencia.

The victory clinched at least a share of the Foothill League championship for West Ranch. With two league matches left, the Wildcats can secure an outright and potential undefeated championship next week with wins over Hart and Golden Valley.

“Something that I had shared with the team early in the year was that number one goal for me was getting a league championship,” Johnson said. “We haven’t had one since 2022 and so that was priority number one. Everybody knows that we won a super magical run last year, but it’s really hard to predict that. What we can do is we can take care of the business in front of us, which is first and foremost, winning league.”

For Manansala, who is one of numerous seniors who have been in the program for at least three seasons, the varsity team has continued to grow exponentially since winning just 11 matches two years ago.

“Winning league was really important to all of us,” Manansala said. “My first year on varsity we were, I don’t want to say, a bad team, but we were terrible. We weren’t very good. And I feel like every year we’ve been building up and we haven’t been quite there. And I feel like it’s just like a full circle moment. We’re all here and we’re all ready to take anything on.”

Johnson believes that 2023 season was a blessing for most of his team, which gained invaluable experience and playing time.

“I thought we might mentally lose a few of them after the tough year that they all had as sophomores but we also knew that we had a wild card in our back pocket, which was, hopefully Noah getting healthy,” Johnson said. “The other boys gained so much experience and so much court time in their sophomore years. Even though they took their lumps, even though they lost a lot of matches, they gained so much experience and so much ability over the years that when they get into matches like this, we are the most experienced team that teams are going to face. And so it doesn’t faze them. They’ve been in this scenario 100 times.”

West Ranch will have some late-season tournament and nonleague action to help sharpen their tools before the postseason begins in two weeks.

“A lot of matches coming up the next few days,” Johnson said, “and because of our success so far this year, we are very highly ranked, the highest we’ve ever been ranked in the history of our school. As of this today, we’re 13th in the Southern Section (rankings). Thirteenth is basically right around Division 1, Division 2 range. And so these matches mean a lot.

“So if we do want to put ourselves in a position to make a playoff run, these matches are important. So we’re going to take them seriously and do our hardest to keep putting the work in, and hopefully good results will come from that.”