(Matt McCarthy/Daily News photo) Iron Mountain’s Georjee Swartout (7) and Bella Rosenthal (17) wait ready to make a play on the ball in a non-conference match versus Kingsford, Oct. 5 at the Mountaineer Gymnasium.

IRON MOUNTAIN — Few prep volleyball seasons are ever made in mid-September. But in a significant way, that’s when the Iron Mountain Mountaineers took the first step to becoming a district champion.

On Sept. 18, coach Jeanne Newberry’s team traveled to Crystal Falls to participate in the Forest Park Invitational. To that point, the Mountaineers had been sputtering –a win here, a loss there. That despite a promising roster comprised of a couple of senior standouts and a host of talented juniors who arrived brimming with confidence after dominating during their first two high school seasons.

Some early problems with COVID-19 quarantines and a few roster changes contributed to Iron Mountain’s herky-jerky start, but that all changed on that Saturday when the Mountaineers won the invitational title.

Newberry said her squad finally had started to jell.

“They became a team,” said Newberry, who just finished her 26th season at the helm of the Mountaineers’ volleyball program. “We needed to start communicating and that was the turning point of them winning. We were on our way to improving every day.”

“What really changed us was we started having fun, working as a team and just encouraging everybody,” said middle hitter Annslee Runsat, who was named the Mid Peninsula Conference Player of the Year and was selected to the West Pac Conference first team. “During that tournament we fully realized our potential, that we could go far.”

Senior outside hitter Bella Rosenthal, who captained the team with Runsat, said the veteran players just needed some time to work out the kinks with the newcomers.

“The first few games were really just like trying to figure out how each other played,” said Rosenthal, a second-team Mid-Pen Conference selection. “It was kind of figuring out everybody’s little tendencies and trying to figure out how to adjust your own game to everyone else’s so you can try to mesh the best.”

While the Iron Mountain season ended with success, the trek there was gut-wrenching for Newberry. On Sept. 1, her mother Lona passed away. Then 26 days later, her husband Tony died suddenly of a heart attack while visiting his parents in Colorado.

Two of the most important people in Newberry’s life, gone in a matter of a few weeks.

The shock of losing Tony Newberry, a exuberant supporter of his wife’s teams throughout the years, reverberated throughout the team. During the upheaval, Runsat and Rosenthal called for a players’ meeting.

“I knew that we had to have a meeting to just get our feelings out,” Runsat said. “It was very devastating. It was such a shock factor that he’s gone now. It was really emotional for us because we knew him and he was always supportive of our team and her. So it was really hard.”

Rosenthal said the players also knew that they were needed by their coach in a much different way.

“It’s really hard seeing your coach go through something so devastating, and we had to be the support system,” she said. “Usually it’s the coach picking you up, the coach always helping you, but we had to take a role and step in and help her as best we could and just try and lift her up in a time that was so incredibly hard for her.

“And it was just really emotional for all of us to be seeing that, especially seeing that she’s been in Annslee’s and my life for so long.”

About a month later, the players gave Newberry their biggest on-court gift — sweeping a formidable Bark River-Harris team on its home court in the district semis and then finishing off their district run with a sweep over Manistique, once again on the road.

“We really evaluated (ourselves) as a team so we could be the best that we could be, especially for coach,” Rosenthal said. “Because if we kept in the kind of lull we were in, nothing was going to get better and we really wanted to be the best we could be for coach.”

Newberry said her involvement with her team and players was special in and of itself.

“They allowed me to grieve, they allowed me to come in and have a bad day or not have a bad day, they gave me that hour and a half of normalcy. So that was a gift.

“They all knew where I was but yet, I was still able to come in and coach,” she said.