When most people finish high school sports and choose not to play collegiate athletics, they assume intramurals will be their only athletic avenue. However, Mississippi State senior Kellie Wicktora had other plans for her athletic career.
The summer before Kellie came to State, she researched club volleyball but had trouble contacting anyone about the team. She took the initiative and pursued this desire when she arrived in the fall and found out the once active club volleyball team was no longer present at State.
Wicktora and her friend Claire Franks took this project upon themselves and started the club volleyball team back up their freshman year.
Wicktora, who started playing competitive volleyball in the third grade, said she had the intention to keep playing volleyball when she came to MSU.
“I started it because intramurals wasn’t enough, and I wanted to do something more competitive, and obviously, other people did, too,” Wicktora said. “With a lot of the girls on the team, we all played competitive in high school and on our high school team, so it’s all of us who decided not to play collegiate, but we’re still competitive enough.”
In the club’s first two years, the team consisted of only 10 players. The third year, the club had two teams, but this season there is only one team in order to keep the players with a high skill level on the same team.
As she said, Wicktora was not alone in her desire to continue her volleyball career at the club level. Senior Kristen Shadle took two years off from volleyball after she graduated from high school, but she said when she heard about the club team her junior year, she wanted to play.
“I wanted to keep playing volleyball because I missed it,” Shadle said. “I wanted to play at a more intense level than intramurals but not quite at the collegiate level.”
Two weeks after tryouts, the club volleyball team had its first tournament at Vanderbilt University. It was a round-robin style of play, and the girls played well but lost to Vanderbilt in the first match after the round-robin.
To State’s credit, only having two weeks of practice with a new team is not much time to prepare for a tournament. Also, some key players were not able to make the tournament.
MSU’s next tournament will be at the University of Tennessee the weekend of Nov. 10, and the team is looking to host a tournament in November.
Junior middle hitter Elizabeth Zampini said the team was close to winning in most games at Vanderbilt but could not finish them out.
“It definitely didn’t go as I thought it would, but it was our first tournament together, so I can’t expect too much,” Zampini said. “I’m excited to go play at UT, and it should be a lot of fun. We are supposed to have more of our team there, so hopefully we should do better.”
In an attempt to allow the girls to get to know each other and thus produce team chemistry on the court, the team had a team-bonding bonfire the night before the tournament. The girls had a chance to roast s’mores and hang out with each other.
Wicktora, or “Coach K” as she is sometimes called by her team, hosted the bonfire. In her past two years with the team, Wicktora has taken on the role of a coach in an effort to gain coaching experience and allow more girls to play in games.
Wicktora said since the team is a student-run organization, everyone must discipline herself, but she runs the drills and eventually wants to be a coach.
“Starting it to where we are now, it’s been a good thing for me to learn leadership skills and organizational skills,” Wicktora said. “For yourself to not have a coach to tell you, ‘Hey you need to come out,’ it’s a good skill to have because it makes you look at yourself in a whole different way as a player. For so long you’re used to someone telling you what to do, so it makes you have to look at your weaknesses.”
Although having a coach who is about the same age has been a different experience for the girls, Zampini said the team is receptive and respectful of what Wicktora tells them.
“If we didn’t have Kellie, it would be really unorganized. She is definitely the backbone of the team and pulls us together. I take what she says to heart and try to do it,” Zampini said. “She says at the beginning of the year that when she says things, we don’t have to do it because she’s just throwing it out there to see if it’ll change something, so she’s very good about not forcing what she thinks.”
The club volleyball team will continue in the spring and hold another round of tryouts at the beginning of the semester. The team will also host the second annual sand volleyball tournament at Rick’s in April.