JOHNSTON – The Wardlaw Lady Patriots find themselves playing a most familiar role heading into this weekend’s SCISA volleyball state championship tournament – that of the favorite.

The Lady Pats (15-1, 8-0) have not dropped a match since an early-season exhibition contest and are the unquestioned leaders now gunning for their third-straight title in Class A.

The tournament began on Thursday in Sumter and continues on Saturday before the Championship match on Monday is moved to a neutral site.

Head coach Kathy James says she beefed up the pre-Region slate in order to stretch the vision of her players and what they themselves felt they were capable of accomplishing.

“I think we’ve been challenged enough because we intentionally played a tougher schedule,” James said Monday. “We played in a tournament at Spartanburg Christian and we played (High School league team) Christ Church and beat them twice. What it meant was that they had to play to a level they hadn’t had to play to before and they were able to see what they could do when they really pushed themselves.”

Still, despite all the talent on hand – all the starters are juniors or seniors – the season did not end without a huge slice of adversity being thrown the team’s way after senior starter Jessica Allen was injured in a car accident that shook up the starting lineup.

James says that the experience of her players showed as they worked to calm her concerns of disrupting the team’s tight chemistry on the court.

“Chemistry is everything and you get used to playing beside certain people so I don’t like things to change once things are going well, but the girls handled it better than anyone could expect and they were reassuring me and telling me ‘we can handle this,’” she said. “All that comes from having a team that is starting all juniors and seniors. They didn’t blink.”

Victoria Cockrell was asked to step into the position and James says she has performed admirably despite never having played at that particular spot on the court before.

“She has just done a phenomenal job and we threw her in there without a practice,” James said. “I told her I’m asking her to play what she had never played before, but because she was senior I knew she could do it. She’s a brilliant girl and I knew that she could handle it.”

Now all that the Lady Patriots need is to focus on what their head coach calls “Second-Set Syndrome” – a point and time in past matches when focus seems to stray from the court.

“We tend to come out strong and then in the second set we tend to lose focus,” James said. “That’s the main thing we have to overcome is to mentally focus for an entire game because physically we have all the tools.”