No tornadoes this time. No television cameras or hordes of media searching for pathos on a 60x30 court. This year, it’s all about volleyball for Wadena-Deer Creek. And that suits Wolverines coach Sue Volkmann just fine.

In 2010, Wadena-Deer Creek won the Class 2A championship while dealing with the effects of a tornado that laid waste to the high school and the media that wanted to tell and re-tell that story.

“Last year was, well, that was something,” Volkmann said. “It’s nice that it’s just volleyball this year.”

Long on tournament trips but short on actual game experience, the 2011 Wolverines needed all the focus they could muster Thursday, coming from behind to beat Visitation 25-12, 18-25, 22-25, 25-15, 15-3 to advance to the Class 2A semifinals.

Visitation (24-7) took advantage of Wadena-Deer Creek’s relative inexperience to take a 2-1 lead after three sets. Volkmann, who has led Wadena to four state tournaments in five years, decided it was time to relax.

“We can get kind of emotional. And not always in a good way,” she said.

In the fourth set, the Wolverines took their sweet time, extending points and utilizing timeouts to their full extent.

“We needed to just start thinking about what we needed to do,” Volkmann said. “We had to calm down.”

Back at ease, the Wolverines (28-4) cruised to a fourth-set victory before crushing Visitation 15-3 in the fifth.

“The fifth set, that was about being down here before,” Volkman said. “We knew what we had to do and we did it.”