As the Boys Varsity Volleyball team moves into the next school year, there will be an evident problem regarding the numbers on their roster: the team will lose eight essential seniors, resulting in a sixty-six percent player decline.
The team currently consists of twelve players, with seniors taking up a whopping eight spots, while two juniors and two sophomores fill the rest. This calls for a very imbalanced ratio within the team, and when graduation rolls around, the future of the team could face uncertainty concerning the program as a whole by next spring season.
With all of the problems an unbalanced roster can cause, there are certain strengths the seniority carries.
“I think a strength we have with these many upperclassmen is maturity. They have more experience with varsity play and just life in general,” Head Coach Diane Scott said. “However, with Boys Volleyball being a spring sport, senioritis has set in. That is something we have had to navigate, given how many seniors we have on the team. We really have to guard against giving up too early.”
For senior captain Christian Van Steenkiste, he agreed that senioritis and burnout has played a big role for the senior squad.
“Some seniors who don’t take the sport as seriously have started to burn out over the past month, which has affected our energy in practices and the overall team dynamic,” Van Steenkiste said.
The reason for this imbalance of players can be traced back to tryouts. The goal was to fill varsity up to create a big roster of skilled, athletic players. However, junior varsity would not have had enough players to compete in a regular season if varsity had such a big roster.
Sophomore Alex Cho spotted the limited amount of open spots this year for underclassmen early, during tryouts.
“I was nervous that I wouldn’t make the team because I am still an underclassman, but I was more certain that I would make the team this year than last year. Last year, the slots seemed to be full, and I was a freshman, so I made JV. This year, there were open slots for me,” Cho said.
For Scott, although there were “open spots,” she still had to make difficult decisions regarding placements for JV and varsity.
“There were and there are people on JV now who have some really great athletic ability, but no experience. I took experience over just athletic ability because I really didn’t have time to do all the teaching that JV needed,” Scott said.
Ahead of next season, Cho isn’t necessarily worried about the ratio, because of how many JV players could get pulled up.
“Next year, I would rather continue building on the positive dynamic we have on the team. I think it really helps my teammates grow athletically and socially,” Cho said.
“I would hope to see a real rebuild of the team next year,” Van Steenkiste noted. “I also know some of the current underclassmen and JV players are going to volleyball camps before next season, which I believe will really help with the team’s development.”
To Scott, playing club sports is vital to the team. The typical opponents of the Boys Volleyball team are city schools, where most of their players already play on a club team.
“If some of our players were to join a club, that would increase our competitiveness tremendously,” Scott said.
