With the growing popularity of volleyball and the increasing number of younger players in Mississippi, the first 12 and under team from the metro area has made nationals, which will take place in June in Minneapolis.
Seven years ago, Rita Sharpe was running a free clinic out of First Baptist Madison with the goal of simply exposing young girls to the sport of volleyball due to its small size in the state. Following the clinic, she started doing lessons with a group of eighth graders, which evolved into taking them to compete in tournaments. That was the start of Mississippi Velocity Volleyball Club. Now, the club consists of 12 teams from ages ten to 16, and this week they moved into a facility in Ridgeland with three courts after outgrowing the back building of the Children’s Academy Daycare.
Velocity is part of the Delta Region, which is made up of Mississippi, Tennessee, and Arkansas. One of Sharpe’s teams, Velocity 12 Black, qualified for nationals after battling in the Delta Bid Qualifier in Cordova, Tennessee and became the first team in the 12U age bracket to do so from the metro area. The team of nine girls will travel to Minneapolis to compete against the top 64 teams in the country June 13-18.
“The team is mostly sixth graders with one fifth grader on our team, Mackenzie Taylor, and she’s pretty good,” Sharpe said. “They have a desire to play, they love to win and they hate to lose. They’re super competitive, and all of them are just really, really hard working girls. They come ready to go, and it’s such a fun group to coach.”
In addition to Taylor, the team consists of Kylie Young, Gabriella Strickland, Catherine Bensler, Laura Freeman, Asia Lindsay, Liza Witt, Macy Gladden and Anabelle Sharpe. The girls attend St. Andrews, Germantown Middle School, Madison-Ridgeland Academy and Madison Middle School.
“To make nationals with this team is huge, because usually volleyball doesn’t pick up until the girls are in high school,” Sharpe said. “We’re trying to grow the sport from a younger age so that they can excel like most other states do. These girls have proven that they can play at a higher level. I’m super excited about that.”
Velocity teams start practice in October – practicing three times a week until tournaments start in December. Once the travel ensues for competition, they practice once a week with tournaments two or three times a month.
“It’s a huge commitment for the parents and the players,” Sharpe said. “We took a well deserved week off, but we are hitting the ground running this week by practicing three times a week to make sure that we are ready to compete at a higher level. We don’t just want to go to nationals. We want to win nationals.”
Sharpe said the girls are great on offense, and they will focus on working on their defense in the coming weeks.
Velocity, as a program, is focused on developing one player at a time and each of the volleyball skills. Sharpe has a firm belief in keeping her teams small in numbers, so the players can gain as much court time experience as possible – both in practice and in tournaments. Her mission is “Advancing volleyball in Mississippi, one player at a time.”
Sharpe has seen volleyball in Mississippi grow significantly in recent years.
She was previously on the board for the Central Mississippi Volleyball Association, which is a recreational league and said the league started with 45 players in 2015. The next year, it grew to 90 and, when she joined the board, there were 300 players, which is where they had to cap it due to space.
“Volleyball in the past couple of years has just really, really grown,” Sharpe said. “I think the high schools are paying more attention to the sport. We have big crowds at the high school level, and a lot of people following us. It all started because we were starting the girls playing younger. A lot of the girls that play now have started when they were in sixth and seventh grade, so it makes them better when they’re at a higher level.”
Sharpe said she anticipates the sport only continuing to grow in Mississippi with new clubs opening all the time and the existing clubs moving into larger facilities because of all the growth they are experiencing. Schools are continuing to add more teams to their programs and even community colleges are starting to add volleyball programs,
“The points are fast, it’s competitive, fun to watch, and indoors so the weather is always good for volleyball,” Sharpe said. “The sport itself has a following worldwide, and we’re just trying to grow it here in Mississippi a little bit.”
