GRUNDY CENTER — With the best volleyball team in the state coming to town, Grundy Center volleyball did not hesitate at the opportunity to test themselves.

Even in defeat, the Spartans took a leap forward in a battle with Dike-New Hartford in the semifinals of the North Iowa Cedar League volleyball tournament at Grundy Center High School on Thursday night.

D-NH, ranked No. 1 in Class 2A and arguably the top team in the state regardless of classification, won the best-of-three with the third-ranked Spartans, 25-21, 25-16.

“The way we approached tonight was that we get to play the best team in the state,” said Grundy Center head coach Lori Willis. “They’ve only dropped one set this year, you can’t mimic that in practice in our gym. This is an opportunity for us to get better, test new things. And I think they totally delivered on that opportunity.”

Grundy Center bounced back for a definitive 25-16, 25-10 win against 2A’s eighth-ranked Aplington-Parkersburg in the third-place match for the Spartans’ best finish in the three-year history of the tournament.

The Wolverines went on to win the tournament for the third-straight year with a sweep of fourth-ranked Denver.

The Spartans were the aggressors early in the first set, building a 9-5 lead behind senior Carlie Willis, the state’s leading attacker.

“We executed our offense very well and had their defense kind of scrambling a little bit,” Willis said. “I’m sure they knew the ball would go to Carlie but she was very deceptive with how she attacked the ball and I think that caught them off guard.”

D-NH punched back with a 7-0 run, helped by four Spartan errors, the hosts stumbling as the Wolverines pounced for what was eventually a 12-4 swing to D-NH’s favor.

The Spartans fended off set point with kills from Willis, Ellery Luhring and a D-NH net violation before UNI commit Jadyn Petersen finished off the Wolverines’ first set win.

The second set was more firmly in D-NH’s control, starting with an 11-2 advantage that allowed the Wolverines to coast as the Spartans couldn’t string enough points together to put the pressure back on the visitors.

“Our passing broke down,” Lori Willis said. “We really struggled to get the ball to Ellery and we weren’t working the seams well enough. We need to recognize that even if it seems like the ball is coming at us, our neighbor needs to come help because it could move on them.”

For the first match of the night against a top-tier team, though, it was an exceptional effort, Willis said.

“Every day, Landry [Luhring, assistant coach] and I as the girls to get 1 percent better, and tonight they took a huge leap,” Willis said. “Now we knew that we had to stay at that level, we couldn’t take a step back, we weren’t done.”

A tall A-P team awaited the Spartans in the third-place match. The Falcons upended Union in La Porte City on Tuesday to reach the semifinals.

Grundy Center didn’t allow A-P to play spoiler to the home crowd once again, though, with a convincing victory.

“Our defense did a great job blocking and getting those touches where we could take the ball and get them out of system,” Willis said of the match with A-P, “and we also had some really good scramble plays where we were able to keep the ball alive and hustle back to base and do all those little things that put pressure on a team.”

Grundy Center and D-NH could cross paths yet again on Saturday, competing in separate pools at the Westside Invite in Cedar Rapids. The Spartans will also tangle with Denver in the regular-season home finale on Tuesday, Oct. 10.

But with all four teams on Thursday holding the top seeds in their respective regional brackets, it’s possible the teams could meet once again under the bright lights of the state tournament in Coralville later this year.

“We’re all making each other better,” Willis said. “Iron sharpens iron. And this gives us confidence that we can battle with the best, that we can get out of our comfort zone a bit and make those changes to get better.”