Good Wednesday morning. We have our weekly look at local girls’ club volleyball in USA Volleyball’s Puget Sound Region in this morning’s Journal. In this segment, we examine the season at hand and how local players and teams are faring. And this week’s edition is a very busy one, as we take a look at one local club’s success in local play this past weekend, and explore a major national issue affecting the sport. We lead it off with a great weekend for Valley View Volleyball, and one of their 15U teams in particular.
Breakout weekend for Valley View’s 15U Sapphire
This past weekend’s Power League action may have been a significant moment in the season for one local girls’ volleyball club.
Valley View’s 15U Sapphire, like most of the Carnation-based club’s programs, is among the lower-seeded teams currently in the Puget Sound region’s local league play. However, this program, like all the others, is working hard teaching their players how to be successful at this sport, and also gain confidence as a result. The girls on this particular team, many of whom are Cedarcrest High School players, saw this first hand as their hard work resulted in tremendous success, and perhaps a nice jolt of confidence as well.
Sapphire went 4-0 on the weekend and won their division to move up the standings in league play. It started out well thanks to tough serving. The Sapphire pocketed 17 aces as a team in their opening match, led by five from Grace McKee, and swept the Bellevue-based Northwest Juniors Baden Navy in two sets, 25-13, 25-13. Matches in club volleyball are best two-of-three sets as opposed to high school varsity volleyball, which is best three-of-five. More tough serving, largely from Vivian Yi and Taylor Miles, guided Sapphire to a win over Grays Harbor Black, from Aberdeen, 25-11, 25-14. Yi strung together 11 straight serves in the first set, six of which were aces, to lead VV in the opening frame, then Miles finished out the match with a string of eight straight serves, helping Sapphire, who had been tied at one point midway through the set, to the victory and sweep.
Things got a little more interesting in the third match, a rematch of the previous contest against Black. After both teams split the first two sets, Sapphire found themselves down 9-2 in the third and deciding frame, clearly needing a boost if they wanted to get the job done. Coach Emma Anderson called time out to settle down the troops, and the girls responded in a big way, outscoring GHB 13-4 the rest of the way and took the set, and match, 15-13.
“The tenacity and drive of each person on the court was so impressive,” the coach, a Mount Si HS grad, told us by email. And they needed that tenacity and drive in spades in the final match. Against Ignite White, from Snohomish County, the two teams again split the first two sets, but VV needed some extra time to take their set, winning it 28-26 in the second to force another deciding third set.
The third was once again a battle, but Sapphire came out on top winning it 15-13. Anderson praised the team. “I saw so much improvement and maturity on the court and I am so proud of these players for never giving up on any ball. This will be a day we remember and build off of all season long,” she told us. In addition to the tough serving early on in the day, hustle, athleticism and tons of heart got them through the much tougher parts of the day as they moved closer to that big accomplishment of winning the division and moving up the chain in the league seedings. They now sit seeded 47th in their age group, which puts them around the middle of the pack. So it is hoped this success can spark a run up the ladder that could see them ultimately reach the top 25 before the season is over.
Anderson knows a thing or two about those attributes; she was part of a high school program coached by a coach in Bonnie Foote that valued all of those things and then some. And she displayed plenty of that herself during her high school days, then translated that to success at the college level, playing for four years over at Whitman College. Anderson graduated from there following the 2021 season. So the hope is is that these girls will have seen that if they put the hard work in that good things can result, and for a team like this, that is definitely a good thing.
National discussion about safety of cities hosting large tournaments in wake of St. Louis tragedy
An issue that took center stage last week on the national level and didn’t really gain a lot of traction until after our segment last Wednesday is whether tournaments need to take a bigger look at the safety – or perceptions thereof – of host cities in consideration of whether those events should be held in those locations. The issue became front and center after a high-profile incident in St. Louis over Presidents’ Day weekend. There, a Tennessee teen player, Janae Edmondson, who was visiting the city with her family to compete in a holiday weekend tournament, was seriously injured – and had both of her legs amputated – following a car crash in the city’s downtown core. The case however took on a bigger focus after it was discovered that the suspect in the crash, 21-year-old Daniel Riley, was a repeat criminal offender and was out on bond from a previous unrelated criminal case but had developed a lengthy history of violating bond restrictions. Those revelations led to a firestorm of criticism of the city’s chief prosecutor, Kim Gardner, with Missouri’s state attorney general filing documents late last week seeking to oust Gardner from office over this matter, which many believe, according to news reports, was part of a continuing pattern of issues regarding the handling of suspects by her office.
For Gardner’s part, she held a news conference vowing to fight the attempt to remove her from office, but it is very clear if you read news media accounts out of St. Louis that there is a lot of outrage over this. And while Janae and her family can be heartened by that – and also the almost $650,000 that has been raised by the volleyball community nationally via a GoFundMe fundraiser for them to defray expenses resulting from this, including some from right here in Western Washington – we were alerted to this fundraiser via a Facebook post on Cedarcrest High School’s volleyball Facebook page – the reality is is that the political fallout from this has been massive, and is not likely to go away for some time.
So why would there be such outrage? Well, here is a passage from a February 22 editorial from the St. Louis Post Dispatch offering their first comments about the case. “News wire stories will spread across the country recounting how a young woman’s life has been ruined because of it. With each newspaper story and news broadcast in cities like Murfreesboro (Tennessee, near Edmondson’s hometown of Smyrna), Americans will begin to get the message that St. Louis is a city to be avoided at all costs. And since Edmon(d)son’s trip here was associated with the dome and convention center, the reputation of that complex, now undergoing an expensive expansion, will be attached to the fact that wanton criminality has destroyed a young woman’s life,” the paper wrote.
The dome and convention center the newspaper refer to here is the America’s Center and the neighboring domed stadium which used to host the NFL’s Rams before they moved back to Los Angeles several years ago, but over this holiday weekend hosted this volleyball tournament, one of many such tournaments that took place all over the United States. And it is this mindset which we think has fueled some of the anger about this from politicians and residents alike. The concern we think that they have is that this case will cause tournament organizers, sanctioning bodies, even teams themselves, to reconsider visiting St. Louis. And since these tournaments generate significant amounts of tourism tax revenues for a city’s entire region, these are events that no city wants to lose out on, especially as many cities continue to recover from the effects of COVID-19 on their budgets and tourism industries.
To that, we will say a couple of things. One, since the convention center and stadium are large facilities, chances are they’ll have a tournament at this time next year. And two, outside of the horrific things that happened to Janae, there were no reports as far as we know of any other player or their family who were visiting the city as part of that event that had any issues of note safety wise. And this is the main thing we want to point out here. While incidents like this are very newsworthy – and hopefully will lead to change that will make the city safer – incidents like this are not the norm.
However, there is and there should be an expectation that athletes and their families, whether they are from the Valley or elsewhere, when they go to a city to participate in an event like this, they should be able to conduct their business at that event with no concern about these things happening to them like they did to the young athlete from Tennessee. Over the Presidents’ Day weekend, we had coverage on this blog of events in multiple sports involving young athletes from our community in five different cities around the country. Las Vegas, Phoenix, Kansas City, Houston and Orlando, FL. And we have done over the years as part of our select coverage coverage of local athletes competing in places such as Los Angeles, Boston, Atlanta, Chattanooga, TN, Minneapolis, Philadelphia, Portland, Denver, Salt Lake City, the list goes on. Whether safety concerns become a bigger issue in the wake of this incident for teams or tournament managers is anyone’s guess. But one thing to us is certain: St. Louis should not worry about whether they lose tournaments over this. What it is they should worry about is making sure that what happened to Janae doesn’t happen again to another visiting teen athlete.
We were hoping to talk to some club directors about this topic, but have not gotten any interest in doing this with us, so if you are a club director locally and want to discuss your tournament scheduling process and the factors you use in that and whether those may change in the wake of the Edmondson case, email us at snovalleysports@gmail.com. We may discuss this subject with a local coach next week by the way so if we do, look for that here.
In other action…..
Also, in local Power League action, there was good news to report for several local teams with Valley players.
Kent’s North Pacific Juniors’ 16U’s suffered their first loss of the season in local play this past weekend, but remained top-ranked in the region in the age group, so they are likely off to play in the Platinum Division events next time out against teams from Portland and southwest Washington. NPJ, with Mount Si’s Carissa Zwiefelhofer, fell in their opener to Tacoma-based DaKine before reeling off three straight wins to maintain hold on the top spot.
Also, a pair of teams from Bellevue-based Sudden Impact with local ties are in the top 10 in their age groups. SI’s 15U Lightning, coached by former Mount Si assistant Dave Bachman, sit fifth in the age group despite splitting their four matches this past weekend, and the 16U Thunder, with Wildcat player Sophie Lobet, went 1-3 but still are ranked sixth in 16U. The 16U Tornado, featuring Mount Si’s Maggie Kamp and Tahoma High School’s Isabelle Foote, daughter of retired Wildcat head coach Bonnie Foote, are ranked 12th, splitting their four matches this past weekend up north in Stanwood.
Valley View clubs held their own, with the 15U Silver and 16U Royal both seeding in the top 40 following the action this past weekend. After the 15U Sapphire, the 13 and 14U Valley View teams are all near the back of the pack in the 14U division.
This weekend
Over the past couple of years, the calendar has had a big change to it – namely that 18U teams have their national tournaments earlier than the rest of the age groups, so their season essentially ends around Memorial Day as opposed to the end of June for those clubs that make the nationals. The 18U teams are holding their regional bid tournament this weekend. Keep an eye on NPJ’s 18U Nationals. The Kent-based team, featuring Mount Si seniors Friley Curtiss and Lauren Kremer, sit 12th overall in the regional rankings with a 6-6 record. But they prepped themselves well with national competition over the recent holiday weekend in Kansas City at a tournament there, so we’d look for that to pay some dividends this weekend. As you may know, both players have found college homes this fall – Kremer with NCAA Division III Whitworth University in Spokane and Curtiss with NAIA Southern Oregon University down in Ashland, OR.
We will wrap all of that up for you here next Wednesday, but in the meantime, that has been your weekly look at local girls’ club volleyball in USA Volleyball’s Puget Sound Region in the SVSJ.
Snoqualmie Valley Sports Journal 