Another season of volleyball begins for the boys as they head into spring. Tryouts happened April 3 and 4 with the first game for varsity and junior varsity starting April 15.
Many managers are working hard from 4-6 p.m on weekdays preparing the boys for tryouts and the upcoming season. Their specific jobs are to manage social media and keep everything all organized, they help at practices with drills or anytime the coaches need an extra hand. Freshman Stella Bruno is one of the managers for this new team. she played volleyball for the school earlier this year and has now decided to be a manager for the boys volleyball team.
“I decided to manage it to get extra knowledge on the sport that I love and just to help out in my community with a sport that doesn’t have very much history here because it just started,” Bruno said.
This year’s volleyball team will be significantly different from last year’s team. Everything overall in the sport will be the same, but there are a lot of new players joining, such as seniors Jerrian Xiong, Christian Yangwakue, Nady Youssef and more. More people and new players will allow the team to improve overall. Pete Farrell has been coaching for 15 years and now coaches boys volleyball as of last year with assistant coach Maggie Briggs.
“Last year nearly the entire roster had little to no experience in playing formal volleyball, while this year over half of our players are already familiar with it,” Farrell said.
A lot of new players are joining this team compared to last year and this is having positive effects on the team as there is players coming from club teams, just starting, or re-joining players from last year who have experience playing for Stillwater. Senior Jerrian Xiong is a new member to the volleyball team. He did not play for Stillwater last year, but he has been playing volleyball for about a year in open gyms with his friends and family. This year there will be a varsity and a junior varsity team.
“The coaches say that even though the other teams are gonna be split up from JV and varsity, that everyone is still just gonna be one team all together, practicing all together, and everybody’s just gonna get the same amount of reps,” Xiong said.
As a team their main goal is to grow and improve throughout the season. Their coaches are doing whatever they can to make this possible and help their layers be the best version of themselves.
“Whether we win or lose, we will evaluate ourselves on how we played as a team, what improvements we have already made, and where we can continue to grow,” Farrell said.
Many boys are looking forward to this as they have a passion for this sport and have never been able to participate in in through the school. It is bringing new opportunities to many people and focusing on inclusivity in athletics throughout the school.
