PC: A ‘roller coaster’ start
First home game Sept. 13
Hired in the middle of June, Pete Rasmussen is still getting used to being the new head coach of Porterville College’s volleyball team.
“It’s been a roller coaster this year just because I started so late,” Rasmussen said. “I didn’t get to do a lot of recruiting so we have a small team right now.”
PC’S team is made up of just nine ladies and six of them are from Porterville or Monache high schools. Ashlynn Miller, Madysen Clower and Emily Baeza are former Panthers, while Rylee Jones, Kaitlyn Herring and Brooklynne Beavers are former Marauders. Also on the team is Jasmine Torres from Delano, Brooke Reilly from Taft and Emerald Harris from Texas.
“We can’t even scrimmage because we only have nine girls,” Rasmussen said. “And that’s tough because I’m a coach that likes to do as much game-like drills as possible.”
The team travels to San Diego today for their first game of the season at noon against San Diego Mesa. Soon after the game, the team will take to the road again to play two games in the Bay Area at the College of Alameda’s 8th Annual Cougar Classic.
With less than two weeks of practice under their belts and only two players — Miller and Reilly — returning, the team will have a rocky start to the season. A plus for the team is that their future is in the hands of a very experienced coach.
For 15 years Rasmussen led the Giants of College of Sequoias from 1998-2013. His teams went to the Northern California Regional Playoffs nine times and were CVC conference champions in 1997 and 2006. COS also placed seventh in the State Championship in 2001.
Rasmussen, who played competitive club volleyball at Fresno State, also has experience coaching club teams as well as high school teams.
Last season, PC went 10-15 on the overall season and took fifth-place in the Central Valley Conference with a 7-9 conference record.
Rasmussen is still learning his team’s strengths and weaknesses but believes the team will be strong defensively.
“There’s some kids out there with some potential, they have some offensive potential,” he said. “We have a lot of defensive potential I can already see. The passing seems to be pretty solid. I’m hoping our serving keeps improving.”
Unable to get much recruiting done because of his late hire, Rasmussen said that rather than setting a target goal of games to win this season, he just wants his team to be competitive.
“We’ve got to be a competitive team,” he said. “The thing we focus on this year is making sure we’re competitive. We’re going to win some, we’re going to lose some and I want to make sure every game we’re competitive.”
Rasmussen spent weeks trying to recruit players, but since many players had already committed elsewhere, he was only able to secure one player in setter Emerald Harris from Houston, Texas. The coach said
Harris is going to be a “good addition” to the team.
Although the team had a summer class, they mainly scrimmaged against former players and didn’t get much time to work together, something Rasmussen wishes they could’ve done more of.
“But we really didn’t have time to work as a team and work on stuff as a team,” he said. “We probably should’ve a little bit more than we did, but again it was me trying to get to know the team and get to know the ins and outs of everything going on in Porterville kind of distracted me a little bit.”
PC begins conference play at 6 p.m. on Wednesday, Sept. 13 at home against West Hills Coalinga. They travel to COS the next week for a 6 p.m. game on Wednesday, Sept. 20.
“I would love to beat them, I really would,” Rasmussen said. “I think this year it’s going to be tough to do that because they’re pretty stacked but…it’s going to be like going home.”