By Curtis Stone
My first year with the Southern Virginia Volleyball team was back in the 2019- 2020 season. We started our season ranked 7th in the nation. Everything was going well. We were on a 10 game winning streak, climbing the ranks, when covid shut us down and we abruptly got sent home halfway through. That year was the last time I saw many of the upperclassmen, as I left on my mission soon afterwards, only to return 2 years later. I only had half a season to play with those guys, and since we had such a good chance to go far in the national tournament, I left like I had lost something special with them.
When I returned to the team in 2021, there was only one guy left on the team from my freshman year, but everything was. . .different. The chemistry wasn’t the same. The people weren’t the same. It wasn’t anything bad, just different. I wasn’t able to play with those same guys from my freshman year again till this last weekend.
We had eleven guys come out for the alumni weekend that men’s volleyball sponsored. Eight of them were from that freshman team I played on. Now I know it wasn’t the exact same as being able to recreate that team from that year, but something about having all those guys in the gym felt fulfilling. . .almost like closure?
The alumni game itself was a blowout. Well, almost a blowout. The first, third, and fourth sets we played were pretty easy wins over the old out-of-practice guys. But the second set was pretty crazy. In volleyball, a set is played until one team gets to 25 points; however, you have to win the game by at least 2 points. So if both teams score 24 points, the lowest possible score would be 26–24. Normally, if this happens, you’ll see scores like 27–25 or 29–27. It’s pretty rare to see anything into the 30s. But for some reason, we decided to let those old alumni guys give us a run for our money and take us well into the 30s for an intense set.
Now, I didn’t get to play all four of the sets that day, but I was lucky enough to play in that highly competitive set. Both of our teams battled back and forth on our way to 25. We would get a few in a row, and then they would do the same. Somehow, we both ended up at 25 points fairly quickly, and then we couldn’t stop trading points. Our team would take the lead and then the alumni would claw back and do the same thing. Over, and over, and over again. It was some of the craziest plays I’ve ever seen with my own eyes. We weren’t exactly playing our best, and neither were they. We would get the lead and then miss our serve and let them tie it back up again. Or they would get the lead and then let us score an easy roll shot. It took until 39–37 for us to finally win the set, and as many of the alumni said after the game was over, “we really shouldn’t have gotten that close to winning.”
Having these guys back, and beating them so easily (except for that one set), made our team that much more excited for the season we have ahead of us. Every one of the alumni that we played with were, at one time, elite players for top 10 teams. So if we can beat them, we have a great shot at not only being a top team in the nation this year, but also a contender for a national championship.
“This is our year” — Head Coach Tom Petersen
Men’s Volleyball Alumni Weekend: A Top Team Since Its Creation was originally published in The Herald on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.