This season for the Lake Mills volleyball team was going to test the strength of the program and this year’s squad has shown the type of program head coach Jim Boehmer has built in his 18 years.

Lake Mills experienced one of its biggest seasons of turnover, losing a group of nine seniors and six starters, but the 2009 edition has come to rival last year’s team.

Boehmer and others on the team had their concerns entering the season but all of those doubts have been erased as the 10th-ranked Bulldogs find themselves with a 36-3 record, two matches away from a trip to the state tournament and confident that they will make the school’s first trip to the state tournament since 2001. The Bulldogs face Estherville Friday in Algona in the semis.

“We’ve come a long way from where we were three, four months ago,” Boehmer said. “Literally going over to team camp I didn’t know what to expect. I knew we had athletic girls, I just didn’t know if we had a volleyball team.”

The team has surprised Boehmer, but he’s challenged the team to rise to another strata. Following the North Iowa Conference tournament championship, Boehmer told the group that it hasn’t accomplished anything that any of his past teams haven’t already done.

“What motivates us is we want to be that team that gets to state,” said senior Darcy Nelson, the lone returning starter from last year’s team that lost to Aplington-Parkersburg in the regional final. “We want to be different from all the other teams in the past.”

It’s surprising to hear the team have state aspirations considering it’s a group that hasn’t played together until this season and is made up of mostly players in their first varsity season, but Nelson said it’s a mature group that knows what it is capable of accomplishing.

Juniors Lindy Pins, Amanda Lampman, Jordynn Finer, along with sophomores Josie Brackey and Morgan Fjelstad make up the starting rotation and the winning tradition has helped motivate the young group pick up where last year’s team left off.

“I’ve tried to get the girls to think we’re not done yet,” Boehmer said.

There was certainly talent coming up through the ranks for Lake Mills, the junior varsity team finished 25-5 last season and the freshman team was 31-2, but it was not going to be quite the same as last year’s team.

“I think defensively we’ve gotten a lot stronger,” Nelson said. “We’ve gotten a lot more blocks this year, we’re digging up a lot more balls. We’re just more aware and we’re quicker.”

The Bulldogs were tested at the start of the season against Forest City and the Bulldogs earned a dominating 25-12, 25-11, 25-21 win.

“We felt good about what we could do,” Boehmer said. “I think really what put us over the top was when played Algona over at the Algona tournament and we took a game from them. Even though we lost the match I think at that point our girls realized that when we play together we can be a great team.”

Since that time Lake Mills has gone 27-1 with its only loss coming to Algona, the second-ranked team in Class 3A. The Bulldogs have only dropped a total of six sets in that span as well.

“Match to match we seem to find ways to win and in many cases, just dominate our opponent,” Boehmer said.