SS Volleyball gearing up
Team getting ready for 2019 season
As the summer calendar nears the end of July and the first of August, the pace starts picking up for the Siloam Springs volleyball team.
The Lady Panthers have had a busy productive summer, according to third-year head coach Joellen Wright, and it’s only going to get busier from here on out.
“We wanted to give them a good break with the (Arkansas Activities Association) dead period and then kind of ease into it,” Wright said Monday after a practice followed by a weight room workout. “Next week is (a practice) every day so we’ll be back in the full swing of five days a week, getting ready. The AAA calendar is a week later too, so that made us want to push it back just a little bit.”
The Lady Panthers went through a long practice on Monday and were scheduled to participate in a team camp at Springdale Har-Ber on Tuesday. They’ll have Wednesday off before returning to practice on Thursday and another off day on Friday.
Next week is when things really get cooking for Siloam Springs. The Lady Panthers will have long practices on Monday and Tuesday and then attend a team camp at Greenwood on Wednesday, July 31. On Aug. 1, the team will have a trip to Magic Springs theme park in Hot Springs, followed by a team camp at Hot Springs Lakeside on Aug. 2.
The past two months have been filled with several activities for the team, Wright said.
In June workouts were optional but the team still had a good turnout of kids, she said.
Wright said the trend of high school volleyball teams in Northwest Arkansas is to keep workouts and team activities light in June “because we want them loving it in October,” she said, hoping to avoid burnout.
On July 10, coaches from Arkansas Tech visited Siloam Springs and ran the Lady Panthers through workout sessions.
“Individual skill camps I really like because college coaches come in and give us their version of stuff,” Wright said. “Sometimes kids just connect with it a different way. If they hear somebody
else say it, they’re like, ‘Oh I finally get what Coach Wright’s been saying for days. I get it.’ That’s totally fine. As long as they get it, that’s what I want to get. I want them to get that experience of a college-level coach too. Sometimes it’s easier to bring them in than for us to go there.”
On July 15 the Lady Panthers had 26 players program-wide (7th-12th grade) attend a camp at the University of Arkansas.
“It was good to see the commitment of so many kids,” Wright said.
This past week, the team traveled to the Oklahoma City area to the Team USA Sitting Volleyball Men’s and Women’s National Team’s headquarters. Sitting volleyball is a paralympic sport played in a seated position by those with disabilities.
“I heard from another coach about taking their team to the USA training center, and I really thought that would be a cool experience for the kids to see people be successful despite their disabilities, their hardships and how they’ve persevered,” Wright said.
“I thought it taught our kids to one, be appreciative with what they’ve been giving and use it to the best of their abilities and, two, not to put people in a box and say you can’t do something just because you may not have two arms and legs. It was great team bonding. It was really good for the kids to get to know each other.”
The Lady Panthers trained with Team USA and learned how to play sitting volleyball, and most cameaway from the experience worn out.
“The kids were like, ‘Oh my gosh,’ huffing and puffing, trying to scoot across the floor instead of running,” she said.
Wright said the visit was inspiring to the team.
“Look what you can accomplish when you look at what you can do instead of what you can’t do,” she said.
With only a handful of returning players from last season’s Class 5A state semifinalist, the inspirational visit may be a good thing for the Lady Panthers headed into the preseason.
Wright said the team needs to establish a second setter as it wants to run a 6-2 (two-setter) offense in 2019.
Junior Makenna Thomas is penciled in as the first setter and she’ll move to outside hitter when her rotation moves up to the front row.
Wright said four girls are competing for the second setter spot in senior Yosemite Zamora, juniors Micah Curry, Hattie Price and sophomore Emma Norberg.
Wright said Zamora is an emotional leader, while Curry has just moved to setter this summer and has great court sense and is very strong. Price, she said, has “beautiful hands” while Norberg is strong and athletic.
Thomas has lots of experience coming back at outside hitter, and the Lady Panthers are excited about their senior middle blockers, Jael Harried (5foot-11) and Rachel Conrad (6-0).
“(Thomas) is definitely somebody we’re going to be looking to go to,” Wright said. “Not to take away from our middles. We’re thankful to have two coming back in Jael and Rachel. We want to utilize them a lot more this year and Makenna already has a good connection with them as a setter-hitter. That’s good. We’re going to be leaning on those three.”
Wright said the team will have to work out the kinks early but should improve as the season goes on.
“It will be bumpy, I think, in the beginning, trying to figure out what works, what doesn’t work,” she said. “But I think our strengths, we’re going to be a good serving team. They can serve on command, where to serve, where to go to. They can take signals from me and go do it with confidence. Defensively we should be pretty strong. Our block is very big. We just have to teach those younger ones how you get to the right spot on defense with a block like that and how we set it up.”
The Lady Panthers are set to open the regular season Aug. 26 at Huntsville.