During the past few seasons, the Our Lady of the Elms volleyball team gained a reputation among its competitors as an easy victory.
“We’ve been a team that other teams think they can beat,” said Aubrey Kozer, a junior captain.
This season, with a 17-2 record, the Panthers are stirring the pot in Division IV girls volleyball.
During an early game against a rival school, the opposing coach threw and broke his clipboard in frustration when his team was losing in the fifth game of the night against the Panthers.
After another victory, Elms coach Joanna Patterson was approached by her rival counterpart and told that the Elms had been marked down as a guaranteed win on the schedule.
“People don’t like to lose to us,” Patterson said. “There’s a stigma that you just don’t lose to the Elms.”
The current Elms volleyball team has the best record of any sports team in the history of the school.
With each game — like the victory over Western Reserve Academy last Tuesday, when the Elms players kept the Reserve players diving for the ball in three commanding games — the idea of state competition, starting the week of Oct. 17, gets a lot clearer.
“We see ourselves going far,” said Mara Esber, senior setter and captain. “We don’t have a limit. We talk about going to states. That’s what we want and that’s what we dream of.”
Their road to winning began three years ago, when Patterson returned to the court. She has been at the school for 14 seasons but took off four years to start a family. During that time, the team’s record took a turn for the worse.
In the three years she has been back, she has stressed a new attitude.
Esber remembers winning only two games her freshman season.
“The difference was when Coach came and told us, ‘You guys don’t have to lose. You can win if you want to,’ ” Esber said.
Patterson stresses offseason training. Seven of the players are in the Junior Olympic league put on by USA Volleyball, and they play in a summer league against much larger schools, such as Hudson and Barberton.
“It helps us work through bugs early in the season,” Patterson said.
The team graduated only one senior, and there are four players who have started on the varsity for three years, including Laura Scroggins, a 6-foot-1 middle blocker who can put up a solid block at the net, and Gabby Charley, a middle back who isn’t afraid to throw her body around the court.
The Elms’ motto is “Teamwork makes the dream work.”
More than any other team she has coached, this Elms volleyball team has great chemistry and strong unity, Patterson said.
It’s that unity on the court that has allowed the team to fight some tough comebacks, like against Canton Central Catholic. The Elms girls were at a deep deficit in the fifth game but came back to take the win.
“If you look at where we were at the end of last season and where we are now, we’re a different team,” said Wendy Kuzmishin, a senior right side blocker and hitter. “Everyone this year is on the same team. We’re all just so driven and we have this goal. It’s not just one person that wants to go to state.”
Before they can make it to state, the Elms will need to play at least five matches against tough teams such as Villa Angela-St. Joseph and Kidron Central Christian.
But no matter how the season ends, winning has been all that much sweeter because no one expected it, Kuzmishin said.
After each kill, the Elms players gather in a circle, cup their hands and make a motion that looks like they’re blowing pixie dust out of their palms.
In reality, it’s not so sweet.
“It’s a little bit of attitude that we throw out there,” Esber said. “Sometimes people think the Elms are pushovers and we’re like, ‘in your face.’ We mean it in the nicest way possible.”
Read the high school blog at http://www.ohiomm.com/blogs/varsity_letters/. Also on Twitter at http://twitter.com/ABJ_Varsity
