Excitement. Energy. Expectations.
Take your pick. All three are spilling out of the Kent-Meridian High gymnasium these days.
Excitement, because after nearly 10 months of anticipation, the Royals are back on the volleyball court. It has brought a new-found energy that has rejuvenated a program which, until last year, had struggled mightily to compete in one of the most rigorous volleyball leagues in the state.
Add the two together and the Royals, contrary to so many previous years, have expectations — not only to compete, but to make a legitimate challenge to the volleyball powers that call the South Puget Sound League North Division home.
“They’re high,” said Kent-Meridian coach Mike Christiansen of K-M’s expectations. “When you return as many kids as we do on a team that did as well as it did last year, we should do better than third.”
At the beginning of last fall, the program at the East Hill school was hardly a blip on the volleyball radar in the North Division. Sure, Christiansen believed. So did his players. And by the time the final whistle blew on the season, those players had delivered bigger dividends than any of the school’s teams during the past decade.
The Royals won 15 matches, including a 6-2 SPSL North record and clinched a playoff berth, something that hadn’t happened since the Mel Tuivai-led 2001 bunch. To put that accomplishment into better perspective, K-M came into 2008 having won just 11 league matches in their last six seasons – combined.
Now, despite graduating standouts Davina Fuiava and McKaley Brewer, among others, the Royals have the highest expectations they’ve had since the late ’90s.
“This is a new feeling for them,” Christiansen acknowledged. “But this is a school that has had a good volleyball tradition and we’ve had a good athletic tradition. … Athletically across the board (at K-M) with football, track, soccer, volleyball, basketball … these sports are trying to get back to that tradition.”
With tradition and expectations comes pressure.
But this year’s edition of the Royals is ready to live up to the hype and challenge for a league title, something the Kent-Meridian has not won since 1994 under coach Drew Terry, who later led Kentlake to three straight state championships.
“I’m just ready to go out and play with my team,” said right-side hitter Kayla Ierlan, one of the North Division’s top returning players this season. “I don’t know what we’re going to achieve because we’re really good right now. But I think we’ll do really well this year.”
This goes beyond ordinary preseason optimism, when virtually every team believes it’s capable of forging a perfect record. For Kent-Meridian, which returns four starters (Ierlan, Cherene O’Hara, Tanya Pyatohka and Raj Dhaliwal) the optimism is real. And their chances are legitimate, especially when considering top teams such as Kentwood and Kentlake, which have combined to account for seven of the last nine North Division crowns, graduated loads of top-tier talent.
Knowing there’s plenty at stake is a feeling many of the Royals haven’t experienced in the past.
“We did so well last year that we do have a lot of pressure on us,” said the lankly 6-foot O’Hara, a second-team all-leaguer a year ago. “We feel that we’ve shown that we’re good, and now, we have to continue to work on our skills and improve as a team. But it’s mostly pressure that we put on ourselves.”
When league matches begin on Sept. 23, the only pressure the Royals are hoping to feel is that which they are putting on their opponents. The ultimate goal for this group is no longer just to hang in there and challenge for one of the five North Division playoff berths, but rather to be in the hunt for a league title, something K-M hasn’t achieved since 1991.
And — if all breaks right — earn their first state berth since 1998.
“Winning the league title is something we really want to do and making it to state,” Ierlan said. “I definitely think we can do it.”
Which adds one more aspect to the list of how the Royals are feeling these days:
Confidence.
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