The Grace Prep varsity volleyball girls are primed to repeat their former success this season with their 11-0 record. After moving down to a division 3A school, the team has undergone numerous changes. The team continues to grow each year, since winning the state championship title in 2012 with only nine girls. Now the team boasts players with a seasoned coach, Sandy Kelm, who is coaching here for her twenty-first year.
Despite the growing team size, we only have two teams this year, junior varsity and varsity, because GPA has moved down to a 3A TAPPS rank system. Most of our competitors do not have more than two teams, so we have foregone our junior varsity A and B teams and opted for only one JV team. The coaches were required to make difficult decisions as twenty-four girls fought for spots on the two teams. After tryouts, thirteen players were put on varsity, while eleven remained on junior varsity.
The varsity girls are pushing themselves, knowing that they work hard to secure playing time on the team. That said, is there more competitiveness between the players? I think that it does contribute to competitiveness, said varsity coach Sandy Kelm, because they know that to be on the court they have to play up at a certain level. On the court and in practice, the girls push themselves to perform their best. The team exhibits healthy competition that shows up when they play a game. We always say in practice that were the best competition were gunna get, said senior team captain Hannah Brown, so playing six-on-six definitely gives us that edge, because we are such a strong team. This competition is one of the aspects that drives team chemistry. Even with many girls of various ages, the lady lions work together to advance in district. Coming into this year we had a whole new team, said senior captain Hannah Hester, and everybody was from a different team last year or new to coming to Grace this year, so we actually started off meshing together really well and we have throughout this whole season.