Liberty girls volleyball caps off perfect season

Donald A. Promnitz, The Hanford Sentinel, Calif.
·3 min read

Oct. 25—The girls volleyball team for Liberty Middle School in Lemoore has a lot to brag about at the end of 2021 with a tournament win and an undefeated season.

Despite it being their first year of coaching girls' volleyball at Liberty, head coaches Katrina Morshead and Melissa Hall — along with their team of seventh- and eighth-graders — were able to pull off a 15-0 record, starting with a win against Riverdale Middle School on Aug. 25. From there, they've managed to dominate the court against every team they played for 13 games. This culminated in the district tournament for the Sequoia Athletic League.

At the tournament, they would beat Sutter Middle School in Fowler and their final opponent — Rafer Johnson Middle School in Kingsburg, bringing their final tally to 15 wins.

But to get to a perfect season, Morshead and Hall had to build the team from the ground up. They initially saw 45 girls try out, and ended up with a team of 19, never keeping a full roster due to social distancing. And while they wanted an even roster of seventh- and eighth-grade players, they ended up with more seventh graders. According to Morshead, they were split into two groups to practice their drills between two games played. Much of this time, Hall added, was spent working on the basics of the game.

"When we first started, I knew, because we only had like a day of practice, I that the things that were going to matter the most were serving and passing," Hall said. "So those were the things that started working and focusing on."

Teamwork was another big part of what was practiced. The girls hadn't played together since the start of the pandemic, so coming into practice, they worked to identify not only the individual strengths of the players, but how well they worked off of each other.

"Because volleyball's really about trust. You can't just get one pass over — it has to be a team effort — three hits and you're over," Morshead said. "They had to learn what 'anticipate' means, and anticipate where's the ball going to be. And so we really got to see their progression of understanding what they needed."

The other big component of teamwork for Liberty Middle School was helping the eighth-graders to get into a mentor role with their seventh-grade counterparts. This will act as an investment for the future, when the older students graduate and their younger players can mentor the incoming girls.

Hailey Ferreira is one of those girls who stepped into the leadership role. An eighth-grader, she was one of the team captains.

"It was a really fun experience to be with everyone," Ferreira said. "I made a lot of new friends and developed a lot of things like positivity and keeping the team going. It was just a fun experience over all."

Ferreira will graduate after this year, but plans to continue playing volleyball in high school.

"It was fun watching them grow over the last couple of months to see where they would end up," Hall said. "Because some of them started off a little rough, but by the end of the season, they were doing fantastic."