Rye volleyball’s season came to an end Saturday in the state tournament’s regional final round.
The Garnets, who made their deepest postseason run in program history, won the first set against South Side before losing the next three, falling 13-25, 25-22, 25-17, 29-27 at John Jay-Cross River.
As the score of the decisive fourth set indicates, Rye battled until the very end.
“I am so proud of the way the girls played today,” said coach Geri Jones. “There was never a time where the girls even seemed like they were giving up. I think they believed until that last ball hit the ground that they were still going to win. And that has been their attitude all season, they just really fight hard no matter what the score is.”
After South Side scored the first two points of the match, Rye answered by winning 20 of the next 28 points to run away with the first set.
The second set was neck-and-neck, with seven ties, but the Section 3 champion Cyclones edged out a three-point win.
“We went out into that game really strong and took the first set with a pretty healthy lead,” Jones said. “We went into the second and the third set with South Side adjusting to what we were doing, and it took us a while to adjust to their adjustment.”
In the fourth set, Rye took an early 6-3 lead before South Side battled back to tie the score at 17-17. Four more Cyclone points pushed the advantage to 21-17. The Garnets pulled back within two, first at 21-19, then 24-22, and eventually forced the set into extra points before South Side picked up the match-winning 29th point.
“They always had a positive mindset that we could still come out in the end with the win,” Jones said of her team.
Rye’s historic run was driven in large part by its trio of senior captains – Phoebe Greto, Emma Lunstead, and Valeria Medina – who added to their record-setting contributions in the postseason. Greto had 15 kills against South Side, including the 500th kill of her career in the first set.
“This team as a whole broke nine school records,” Jones said. “Nine different individual records were broken as well.”
Greto had 559 hits, a 93% hitting percentage, and 291 kills in her senior season. Lunstead, the team’s standout libero, had 436 digs and successfully redirected 337 opponent serves to Rye’s setters. Many of those were to junior Amelie Modesto, who put up big stats of her own, with 314 good serves, 2,116 sets, and 727 assists.
Greto, Lunstead, and Modesto all received all-section honors, and Medina joined them on the all-league team.
Modesto directed Rye’s offense with 42 assists against South Side and will return as a key member of the Garnets’ talented core next season.
Rye came up one win short of advancing to pool play in the Class A state tournament semifinals, but in many ways, the 2025 season was one for the books.
