Okay, I'm going to say this upfront: This team is worth watching. Come and enjoy the Big Sandy Girls' skills and help support them. Their first matches are away on August 30th at North Star and August 31st at Belt for a tournament. The first home matches are September 12th against Highwood and September 19th against CJI.
I walked into the Big Sandy gym, and the first thing I noticed was that the girls were exhausted and sweating. I said, "Hard practice," and they said yes! At the beginning of the interview with head coach Brittany Richard (McKenney), I said, "So, that was a hard practice!" She said, "We do a lot of those hard practices. We've got to be in shape, especially for those tougher matches. And we're going to have tough matches this season. We have to be in shape. We have to take it one step at a time." When I interviewed the seniors, they had big dreams. They want to go to State. Brittany said, "State is a long way off. That's not really on my radar whatsoever. For me, it's taking it one match at a time, starting with that, and then seeing where that takes us. If we get too far ahead of ourselves, that's not always great." She has almost her whole team back, as she only lost one from last year's team. "Twenty high school girls have turned out for volleyball, which is a large number, an exciting number."
I believe Britney has done a good job building this volleyball program. Every year, the stats improve. She said, "And so it's exciting for them to see that growth, and exciting for me to see the growth and know that we are getting better. And just the number of participants, there was a lot of excitement and practicing during the summer. Yes, this summer, by far, was the most attendance for open gym, scrimmages, camps, and tournaments."
Junior high, with 6th,7th, and 8th grader, has 15 athletes.
"There are five seniors on the squad this year: Eva Yaden, Jenny Sant, Jay Bauman, Elise Hartley, and Ivy Washburn. They know what last year was like for us. It's a matter of revenge and redemption this year because we had a great season last year, our conference record and everything was great, but when we got to tournament time, we didn't perform how we knew how. The seniors have big goals and big dreams to have a successful year. But the main thing is to keep reminding them we must focus on what match is in front of us, not what could come down the line.
Morgan Simpson is the assistant coach. Sarah Sura will also be helping with high school volunteering and junior high, which is amazing. Mikki Panch is the Junior High coach.
