Spartan Volleyball spikes into new season

Justin Seward
Times Reporter

 

The Strathmore High School senior volleyball teams are heading in different directions in terms of experience and seeing results on the court this season.
For the boys, based on practices and the returning players, they are destined to go all the way, and for the girls it will be a new experience for many of them but it will be about making the program stronger.
“We have a lot of really good athletes,” said boys head coach Cole Hintz. “They grew, they’re a year bigger, they’re a year better and everyone came back excited to play. You could definitely see that in the first week, everyone was excited to get back at it and hopefully accomplish some big things this year.”
This year’s roster is comprised of many players who had played club volleyball, while there are others who are great athletes that are new to the game and require some practice.
Hintz thinks once the team gels this will only help the team becomes a stronger unit on the court.
“It’s good to have a mix of those two,” he said. “Because you have that excitement of doing something for the first time. Then you have the guys who have been there before and kind of know what to expect. Everyone can help each other.”
Having won zones a season ago has Hintz thinking that the players will only be driven more at tournaments and will need to be more aggressive to score some points.
“The older guys learned that they need to be aggressive to score points,” said Hintz. “Just establishing that and fine tuning our systems surrounding that throughout the year is what we need to do. Our practices should be a real good indicator of the level we can reach in games.”
Middle Caleb Funk would like nothing more than to go on a long run in hopes of winning zone and provincial banners.
“I think we got a pretty good chance,” said Funk. “We got a pretty strong team this year, lots of returning players. I think it would be really fun if we can make it to provincials.”
He wants to improve his hitting during the games in preparation for next club season.
Randy Moncks’ senior girls squad have many new players that are new to the team and he expects it to be a rebuilding process for a couple of years.
“Last year we had three Grade 10s and two of them were superior athletes,” said Moncks. “I think we’re younger this year, probably not as physical as we were last year. It’s going to be a growing process. Unfortunately we cut some Grade 12’s and it always hurts them a little bit. We’ve got to build, we got to give our 11’s touches and give them some playing time.”
Moncks added where the strength may lie is in the group of Grade 11s, who have strong athletic abilities and will determine some of the team’s success thus year.
“I think our problem has been we’ve had two or three Grade 12’s, they go on and we’re not super strong at the upper levels,” he said. “We’ve got a group here for the first time ever, Grade 11s that are big solid athletes and there’s a lot of them. We’re trying to keep that core together and hopefully it’ll give us some results.”
He hopes that this will create a challenge where the 11’s will battle the 12’s for court time.
First year player Jayda Stewart knows it will be a learning process playing with the senior level but is excited for the competitive aspect.
“On the senior team it’s more competitive,” said Stewart. “And just stepping the A game a little more and try your best. I like just being with a bunch of friends and it’s nice to be out there playing the sport as well.”
Junior Varsity head coach Carrie Westgard was impressed with what she saw come out of her team at the season-opening Black Diamond tournament last weekend and thinks there is a lot of upside to this group.
“Our team I think has really good potential,” said Westgard. “Once we teach them our systems, they’re going to be successful and showcase what they can do. There is still a lot of technical skill work we can do with them. They have a lot of room to grow and I’m looking forward to working with them in that sense.”
Westgard believes that they’ll succeed if they play with that eagerness and no quit attitude the girls displayed in the tournament over the weekend.
“They’re fighters, they’ll work hard,” said Westgard. “They’re go-getters, they don’t like to lose. Even though the focus of the tournament this past weekend was not to focus on the score. For them they were okay with not worrying about score but they wanted to play with everybody. They’re focus and intensity is really good to see.”
From here on in going into these next couple of tournaments, there will be more of emphasis on systems and showing that play on the court.
“We’ll be focusing more on our systems and making it second nature,” she said.
Meanwhile, a Junior Varsity team has been formed and coach Hintz is looking forward to developing the program.
“Our younger guys, we want to grow and develop,” said Hintz, who is coaching both the senior and junior Spartans. “And get used to being aggressive to winning points. They’re going to have a lot of different experiences to get to that level.”