Sea King champs!

NORWALK — Coaching at Corona del Mar High for 20 years, Coach Steve Conti has seen the effort before from his boys’ volleyball team. He calls it the “Corona Cruise” mode.

The Sea Kings sometimes have to go through some trials and tribulations before they can figure out where they stand. In their final match of the season, No. 2-seeded Oak Park was about to sweep the No. 1 Sea Kings in the CIF Southern California Regional Division II finals on Saturday.

Oak Park claimed the first set with ease and the next one played out much tighter. Game 2 offered CdM a glimmer of hope and that carried into Game 3, Game 4, and then in the decisive Game 5.

All the momentum was with the Sea Kings, enabling them to roar back to beat Oak Park, 16-25, 25-27, 25-18, 25-18, 15-10, to win the tournament for the second time in as many years at Cerritos College.

A week after going the distance and losing in the CIF Southern Section Division 1 finals to Huntington Beach on the same court, the Sea Kings (31-7) can call themselves champions. They first breathed a sigh of relief, before celebrating Conti’s third CIF Southern California Regional Division II title in five years.

“I’m going to have a heart attack,” said the 49-year-old Conti after watching his team pull off a first this season, rallying to win after dropping the first two sets in a match. “This match worried me more than the Huntington match in some ways because I think it was kind of a set up match for us coming off that Huntington match [last week in the same gym], just emotionally how we played. I was just concerned our guys would kind of underestimate these guys a little bit. I tried to stress it for two days.

“I think this is a gutsy victory for us. We certainly didn’t play our best volleyball. I think some of that has to do with the way Oak Park started the match, but in the end the Sea Kings kind of rose up, which was kind of special to see.”

During Conti’s time with the Sea Kings, he had never won consecutive postseason titles. Oak Park was the last team to get in the way of CdM’s back-to-back championship run. Three years ago, the Eagles topped CdM in the CIF Southern Section Division 2 finals.

One member off that Oak Park team back then was Woody Cook. Now as a senior, he tried to stop the Sea Kings from repeating as CIF Southern California Regional Division II champions. The outside hitter recorded six kills and two digs in the opening set, allowing the Eagles to prevail, 25-16. In Game 1, CdM hit a dismal .067, and its biggest hitter, Ryan Moss, hit a negative .222.

Moss got out of his slump in the next set. The USC-bound outside hitter collected four kills, his final one sparked a 7-1 run that tied Game 2 at 24-24. Oak Park struggled closing out the set, three times it had set point and each time it failed. Either Kevin Fults or Augie Miller, who had six and four block assists, respectively, teamed up to stuff Cook, or Fults recorded one of his four kills to keep CdM alive.

Cook finally finished the Sea Kings with his seventh kill in Game 2, getting Oak Park closer to finishing as the CIF Southern California Regional Division II champion for the first time in the program’s history. The Sea Kings were also the team Oak Park won its first section title against, after the Eagles had lost in the section finals four times from 2006-11.

“The first set nothing could go our way, the rhythm, the flow,” Moss said. “Our chemistry just went down the drain. We just shut down on ourselves. We didn’t play as a team, and it carried into the second set. We were down five points in the second set, until we started playing. We fought back in the second set, still lost. Then in the third and fourth sets, I think we really played to our potential. [It was] scary in the fifth set.”

Moss and Sam Kobrine elevated their play in the final three sets. Setter Matt Ctvrtlik, who amassed 53 assists, kept going to the two outside hitters. During the last three sets, Moss totaled 14 kills on 22 attempts, with no errors, hitting .636, while Kobrine had 14 kills on 25 attempts, with only four errors.

One of Moss’ three service aces helped CdM secure its first win, a 25-18 result in Game 3. The Sea Kings took Game 4 by the same score, with Will Hunter smashing one of his nine kills and coming up with one of his eight blocks assists late.

Game 5 saw CdM score the first point on a Moss kill, but then it fell behind, 5-3, thanks to two CdM shots going wide, an ace by Oak Park’s Tristan Penrod, a net violation by CdM, and then Cook’s 20th kill. Cook didn’t record a kill the rest of the way, as the Sea Kings dug balls. Fults had the most digs with 19, followed by Moss’ 13, Ctvrtlik’s 10, libero Hagen Truninger’s nine and Kobrine’s seven.

Moss gave CdM its first lead since the start of the final set, hitting a winner to make it 8-7. Then the 6-foot-7 senior and Hunter, a 6-4 middle blocker, stuffed Grigory Manyak’s shot, forcing Oak Park (35-6), which trailed by two, to take a timeout.

The break didn’t stop CdM, which extended the run after a violation by Oak Park and Ctvrtlik’s first ace. With an 11-7 lead, the Sea Kings’ key seniors, Moss, Fults, Miller and Truninger were on their way to going out as winners.

“Same thing last year, [when we] lost in [the late rounds of the] CIF [Southern Section Division 1 playoffs] and [we] got to send our seniors out with a win,” said Moss, who finished with a team-high 19 kills, one ahead of Kobrine’s total. “I’m so happy I can do it this year with our group of seniors. We deserved it, we earned it, and it’s a great feeling winning our last match.

“There’s more of a sense of fulfillment this year. We swept [Los Angeles] Loyola at Loyola, a huge hurdle for us [in the section semifinals], and we played our hearts out against Huntington last weekend [in the section finals]. We’ve all been playing together since we were 10 and 12 years old. We’ve come up together. We grew up together. I would rather lose with these guys than win with those guys.”