SAN JOSE — When two teams play each other four times in a season, there are no secrets. But that doesn’t mean there can’t be a magical moment.
Both teams knew what was coming when Branham and Leigh met for the fourth time in 2025 on Thursday with a spot in the CIF NorCal Division III boys volleyball championship match on the line.
Branham ultimately prevailed over host and top-seeded Leigh 22-25, 25-21, 25-23, 20-25, 15-11 in another memorable match.
With fourth-seeded Branham leading 6-4 in the fifth set, Leigh senior Cooper Smith leaped to take a vicious swing at a free ball and bring the Longhorns within a point. Normally, that’s close to a sure thing. But not this time. Branham sophomore Pasha Znamerovsky rejected Smith’s attack with a one-handed smack of his own.
The ball landed on Leigh’s side of the court, and suddenly, Bran-ham’s confidence couldn’t be contained. The Bruins took a 7-4 lead and used it to get to the finish line, completing a rally from a set down early to win the fifth and deciding set and reach the NorCal title game.
And much of it traced back to the singular moment when Znamerovsky made it clear. It was Branham’s turn to pull off a signature postseason win after losing to Leigh in the CCS Division I championship match last Saturday.
“It was amazing,” said Znamerovsky, whose team faced No. 2 seed International-San Francisco on Friday for the NorCal Division III title. “I knew he was going to swing at that ball, and I just went up trying to block him, and it worked. It went straight down.
“It really helped hype the team up. After that, everybody was like, ‘Yeah, let’s win this right now.’ ” Branham (28-10) had just lost a five-setter to the Longhorns (26-9) five days prior, with Leigh winning the final set 15-6.
On Thursday, though, the two teams traded leads multiple times in the first four sets.
In the fifth, Branham grabbed the initial lead, Leigh led 2-1, Branham went up 7-4, Leigh tied it 8-8, then Branham finished on a 7-2 run.
“We wanted to win the first round to come back and have the opportunity to play Leigh again,” Branham coach Heather Cooper said. “We went into practice going, ‘Let’s start over. Let’s have fun. We know what we can do, and let’s just, when we get to game time, put it all on the court.’ ”
The Bruins didn’t have to go back to the drawing board entirely. In the teams’ second meeting of the year at Branham, the Bruins swept Leigh 3-0.
Another win was in there somewhere. But it was never going to be a sweep. Not on this stage.
“We knew it was going to be a nail-biter,” Leigh coach Jeff Arga-bright said. “Back and forth, back and forth. They’re a great team, a great program. When we got on board here, they were the top team around. They’re really a reason, a catalyst for us dialing in so much because we wanted to get to that level.”