By ALEC ETHEREDGE | Sports Editor

NORTH SHELBY – Since finishing the Oak Mountain volleyball tournament off with three consecutive wins, the Briarwood Christian Lions have been on a roll and that continued on Tuesday, Sept. 4, when they played host to Leeds and Bessemer City in a tri-match at Briarwood Christian School.

While the Lions sat at 4-4 coming into the match, those four losses this season were all to higher classification teams and came against Brookwood, Helena, Oak Mountain and Pelham.

All of those teams are not only at least one classification higher, but are legitimate threats to win state championships in their classification as well.

It was a difficult start to the season for a young team, but it helped them grow against top-level talent, which is now paying off.

In the tri-match with Bessemer City and Leeds, Briarwood was able to not only win both matches against those two teams, but ended the night with a clean sweep taking both sets from both opponents for an easy 4-0 night.

To go beyond that and show how dominant of a night it was, the Lions gave up less than 10 points in three of the four sets they won.

In the first match against Bessemer City, Briarwood held the Tigers to less than 10 points in both sets to pick up an easy 2-0 sweep. Each set featured a final score of 25-8, which gave the Lions all of the confidence in the world going into their matchup with the Greenwave.

As if Briarwood wasn’t good enough in that first match, the team came out in the second game of the night against Leeds and put together its most dominant performance in the first set.

The Lions came out and held Leeds to just six points in the first set to pull off an opening win of 25-6 and a 1-0 lead in the match.

Finally, in the second set of the match and fourth of the night, Briarwood was tested. The Greenwave came out having to win to keep the match going and it showed with their effort, but the Lions were still too much.

They were able to close out the night and the set with a 25-21 victory, which gave them another 2-0 victory.

Briarwood has now won six of its last seven matches, and the Lions are showing that they haven’t just grown early in the season, but that they can be a state tournament team this year.

With a young team having already grown, and still plenty of growing left to do, it’s a team that hasn’t reached its full potential and can be scary when it does.