Winning After MidKnight
The
Middletown High School Knights Junior Varsity Volleyball team is a team in a
state of flux.
New coaches,
new players, and new day-to-day stuff to get used to can make life difficult on
the players and coaches.
For most high
school sports teams across the country this is the everyday norm as
year-to-year you’ll have usually at least one new group of players rolling in
per year. On top of that coaches come and go based on what schools system they
teach in and if they change school systems to get a higher paying job, if they
change schools within that system thus giving them a chance to take up the job
they currently have at a different school, or if they choose to move to a
different school to coach there even while still teaching at the school they
left behind.
This makes
high school sports a consistently fluid, consistently moving entity with the
only rule of thumb being that if you don’t like how things are at the moment
than wait a couple seconds and they’ll probably change to something different.
Things can be
done to alleviate this issue and it is not a situation where just because
things change there can’t be a sense of unity and familiarity within a program.
Quite the
opposite, actually.
Especially in
small towns like Middletown where everyone knows everybody, the basketball
programs from middle school to high school are connected because the kids that
play on these teams become the high school teams in the future. On top of that,
most of the athletes inside the middle school and high school programs, know
the kids who are either two years below them or two years above them meaning
that as the kids move up together as a group in small chunks, the athletes
still stay in touch meaning that when they finally end up on teams together
it’s like they’ve been playing together for a while.
How does this
relate to Middletown?
It’s because
the Middletown Volleyball program has followed this exact same blueprint and
because of that the Junior Varsity Volleyball team will look to have success on
a greater level because of this tight-knit bond.
After seeing
a large number of players move up from Junior Varsity to Varsity because of
senior departures, one of the more common instances of the high school athletic
flux, the Knights had to go with a squad that has a large group of newcomers
including one at coach.
No problem
for the Knights, as most of these kids have played with each other in
volleyball of some form and know each other because of the youth volleyball
program in the area, the Frederick County Middle School Volleyball League.
Add to that
the fact that these current teammates, or at least most of them, spent two
years together going to school at Middletown Middle School and it is
understandable how already solid bonds would have been formed between the
members of this team.
Bonds that
the Knights hope will make them stronger this year.
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