Volleyball Festival returns to Phoenix, brings international flair.
The Volleyball Festival returned to Phoenix this week and brought teams from all over the country and — this year — the world.
The annual gathering, in its 35th year of play, brings together club programs and has taken place in the Phoenix Convention Center since 2009. The Festival is organized by Bryan and Anna Kelley, who serves as CEO and played in the inaugural festival in 1984.
This year’s event brought 500 teams to the downtown Phoenix area, including a few teams that traveled thousands of miles to play against top-level club competition.
From across the pond
Auro Corrazessi doesn’t get to bring a volleyball team from Italy to the U.S. often but he every time he does, he makes sure to plan the trip around the Volleyball Festival.
After a memorable trip to the Festival in 2001, when it was held in Sacramento, Corrazessi, the director of Invicta Volleyball, was able to bring a group of players from his town of Grosseto, south of Tuscany, in 2009 when the Festival moved here to the convention center.
It is hard to find the means to take such an arduous trip, but this year, a combination of players from Grosseto, Pisa and Livorno (that latter two from the north of Tuscany), were able to find the required funds to make it happen.
Because of the players' distance from each other in Italy, they had been able to practice only three times together before the opening match on Thursday afternoon, Corazzesi said.
Despite the minimal preparation, the team won both its matches on the first day behind the strong play of setter Annalisa Milani.
Milani, the youngest player on the team at 12 years old, has had this trip in mind for three years. She picked up the sport when she was five years old after watching her sister play and has quickly become the best setter on the team.
No matter the result of the tournament, Corrazessi wants to make sure the trip serves as a bonding experience for the girls. The team spent a day in New York City before coming to Phoenix and plans to visit the Grand Canyon, Las Vegas and Los Angeles after the competition.
Heading east
The Ho'oikaika Volleyball Club from Hawaii has never been this far east.
They have competed in a few tournaments in California but this is the first time on the United States mainland for many of the girls on the under-16 team.
“I thought everyone would be taller,” Kiersten Gummerus said, looking around at the massive convention hall where nearly 80 matches were taking place at once.
The team’s head coach, Noe Perreira, plans to use this tournament as a barometer to test her team’s skill level.
Perreira is coaching this team as a way of giving back to the next generation. The founders of the Ho'oikaika Volleyball Club were the same coaches who helped her get recognized and pushed her to a successful collegiate career at the University of Missouri-Kansas City.
“During my first two years (at college), I basically cried every day to go home,” she said. “We are very family oriented and we like to be close to each other. And I was really far away.”
She spent time coaching around the U.S. after graduating in 2004 but felt the pull of family tug her back to the islands, where she was able to keep her coaching career alive with the Ho'oikaika Volleyball Club.
In this week's competition, the team had trouble adjusting to the air and playing in a closed environment. Most of the time in Hawaii, they play in open-air environments, so having to play in a massive convention center with air conditioning will take some time.
“It makes it hard to breathe,” Perreira said about the change in climate.
Despite losing their opening match on Thursday, they bounced back to defeat their final two opponents of the day in straight sets.
Up for the challenge
The Under-18 USA Deaf Volleyball team might have had the least amount of preparation of any team in the competition. The players assembled in Arizona on Monday to hold their first practice as a unit.
Girls from across the country had come together just three days before the opening match for daily practices to build chemistry. This is the biggest competition that the team will play in all year, but the experience they’ll receive from being coached by members of the U.S. team can be invaluable.
Sarah Tubert, an assistant coach for the team and the current captain of the U.S. National Women’s Deaf Volleyball team, was heartened by the passion the girls showed in the first few days of practice to improve. For many of them the eventual goal is the make the final national roster.
“These girls come from all walks of life and different faiths and to see them bond over volleyball (is great),” Tubert said.
The team won all three games on Thursday, including two 3-set wins to open to the tournament.