The sun is rising earlier and staying up longer, the weather is warmer, and basketball brackets are prepped, which means that spring sports, including beach volleyball, are under-way. Many student athletes and coaches are especially excited for this season after losing last year’s season. So far in the season, the beach volleyball team has a record of 1-0, winning their first game against Desert Ridge. 

The team faces the reality that a lot of the girls are both indoor and beach volleyball players; this can cause schedule conflicts. Junior Jordan Swan, who plays on the second team, said, “the only concern I have is scheduling, because a lot of the girls play indoor as well, so it’s hard to get our schedules so we don’t miss any beach, but we also don’t miss any indoor.” Beach volleyball coach Fred Mann said, “[We] try to work around the availability of the girls, because I do not want the girls to choose between beach volleyball or indoor volleyball.” The team has substitutes when the girls are not able to make it to the game. Sophomore Avery Burks, who plays on the second team with Swan, said “Our biggest concern is playing schools who have club beach volleyball players with a team where the players are primarily indoor players.” Junior Adeline Galvanoni, who plays on the fourth team, said “we’re nervous to play the older girls at the other schools,” because a good portion of the girls on the team are lower classmen, with only a handful of seniors. 

Any sport is an opportunity to learn and grow as an individual athlete and as a team. Mann explained that in practice, one thing that the team is working on is ball placement. “We’re trying to work on placing the ball in one of the four corners. In beach volleyball, you want to shoot to make it difficult for the opponent to recover,” Mann said. Burks said that one of her individual goals, “is to try to go undefeated, because my partner and I play club together, so we should do pretty well.” Swan said that another technique that they are perfecting is serving with the wind and serving tough. 

Mann said that some of his goals for beach volleyball this year in addition to making it to the state championship include wanting, “the kids to have a good experience playing beach volleyball. It’s a fun sport.” He further explained that he has more competitions and games during practice, as opposed to running drills the whole time. Swan summed up the team’s approach for this season when stating, “We’re just going to continue working everyday to try better and reach farther…we’re just working it each day at a time.”