When the Napavine High School volleyball team takes the court for the first time this fall in September, the squad will look a little different from this past spring and year’s past.
Okay, maybe a lot different.
With the graduation of several star seniors, and other departures of key players from last season, the Tigers won’t have a single junior or senior on their roster this fall. So head coach Monica Dailey and the Tigers are embracing the youth movement in Napavine, and the goal remains the same as years past: making state.
“The girls are really buying into that, knowing if that’s where we want to be, this is what we need to do,” Dailey said. “They really want to be strong, and they really want to be able to make playoffs.
“We have a lot of competitors in our program, we’re super young but that doesn’t mean we can’t achieve those goals.”
With just a handful of returning contributors from the spring season, mostly sophomores, the Tigers have still set high goals for themselves. Though there will almost certainly be struggles, it just means the team has more room to grow, Dailey said.
“This is a time for these girls to grow as leaders, if the season doesn't go the way we want this year, we’re definitely setting the foundation for the future,” she said. “I’m so excited for them to step up and be leaders now because they are going to be such strong leaders by their senior year. It’s going to be something that really helps our program.”
Though the goals remain mostly the same, the path to get there might look different from how Dailey got the Tigers to state in previous years. With no proven contributors with heavy experience on the entire roster, Napavine’s young talent will have to learn on the fly.
With physical tools and skills already there for most of her varsity starters, Dailey says the biggest challenge will be on the mental components of the game.
“That’s something you have to spend a lot of time on,” she said. “In the past those older players have helped bring those players along, that’s something we have to focus on this year.”
In her 17th year at the helm of Napavine volleyball, Dailey hasn’t experienced a challenge like this since she took the job to rebuild the program years ago. But this time, Dailey knows exactly what to do, and the program, and expectations, are the same as years when they were making state runs.
Though the cards seemed stacked against Dailey’s squad, with no juniors or seniors, her competitiveness won’t let her drop any expectations for growth and improvement over the course of the 2021 season.
“The biggest thing for us is to just have fun,” Dailey said. “The biggest thing is to learn and grow and have fun while doing it and of course, make it to state.”
