Morgan Hill – Coming off an undefeated championship season the
Sobrato High School girls volleyball team has progressed from the
West Valley (C) Division up to the Santa Teresa (B) Division of the
Blossom Valley Athletic League and is standing tall in pursuit of a
repeat league title.
Morgan Hill – Coming off an undefeated championship season the Sobrato High School girls volleyball team has progressed from the West Valley (C) Division up to the Santa Teresa (B) Division of the Blossom Valley Athletic League and is standing tall in pursuit of a repeat league title.
In 2006 the JV won league with a 13-1 record and the Varsity won league with a 14-0 record, and with the teams now virtually combined they are poised to achieve success in the higher division.
“We only lost one senior from last year so the team is basically returning intact,” co-coach and Sobrato Athletic Director Kevin Miller said.
The coaches brought up a number of juniors who might otherwise have played JV, but because of such a large turnout of freshman and sophomores, they needed to make room on the JV team, Miller said.
About a week ago Miller and co-coach and wife Rosemary Miller also brought up a sophomore to make room for freshman on JV.
With a plethora of quality players, the coaches had a hard time choosing the team captains.
“We’re blessed this year … we could have just closed our eyes (pointed our fingers) and went captain, captain, captain,” Miller said regarding choosing his team captains. “And we couldn’t have gone wrong with any of the girls.”
Ultimately the coaches chose seniors Cheyenne Hambey, Nicole Simoneau, and Jenna Spark, and junior Laura Billos to represent the team.
“The three senior captains are original players from the first day the girls volleyball program opened,” Miller said. “We felt they deserved to be captains because of their skill on the court, but also as a sign of respect for them.”
At the end of the 2006 season Sobrato beat Oak Grove, making school history by securing the school’s first ever league championship.
“They’ve put in hard work to build and get the program to where it’s at, and hopefully they can continue to move it forward,” Miller said. “That’s the least that we can do … put them out there and let them get the spotlight.”
Sobrato played in a pre-season tournament at Independence High School last Saturday, and while the games don’t count on their record, they unofficially won every game.
Billos was chosen as captain because offensively she will be the go-to player, Miller said.
“She’s a great kid with a great attitude,” he said. “And she was tearing things up on Saturday.”
Billos, 15, is looking forward to playing in the higher division and seeing how her team does against better teams.
“We played some of our old opponents, in the C division, from last year and we smashed on them,” Billos said. “We really click when we’re on the court together.”
Senior middle blocker Cheyenne Hambey, 17, is looking forward to playing her last season with this group of girls, and wants to bring home another banner.
Becoming league champions will be a lot more difficult this year, but a lot of the team members have been working out and conditioning since May in hopes of making a repeat league title a reality, Hambey said.
“We’ve been working hard and we want this bad,” she said. “The Santa Teresa division will have harder competition and faster games, but almost all of our varsity team has been playing club together since last spring.”
Hambey is looking forward to playing Willow Glen because it has height and y good hitting players, she said.
“And we’re gonna play Andrew Hill, and they have no height but they pick up everything, and they somehow bring it back over and they make us scramble … they’ll give us some trouble,” Hambey said.
Last season Sobrato lost in the first round of the Central Coast Section Championships to a tough Monterey team, but Miller said that moving up a division will help to prepare them for success if they should make it to the post season again.
“Because of the league we were in (West Valley division), we didn’t really see that kind of quality competition,” Miller said. “We saw that in the preseason, but we played a season that was definitely slower for our girls.”
Going into the season, Spark, 17, said she is ready for the faster pace, and most excited to do better in CCS.
“Last year was all of our first experience in CCS and we were all really intimidated … we had like five fans there and it seemed like everyone else was rooting for the other team, and we were nervous,” Spark said. “But we’ve worked really hard over the summer (lifting wights, conditioning and practicing), and hopefully all the hard work will pay off.”
Reigning league MVP setter Nicole Simoneau, 17, is embracing her new role as team captain and hopes to use her skills and position to get Sobrato into the post season.
“Becoming a captain has given me more confidence and I think that I can do a good job leading the team to another league championship this year,” Simoneau said. “We get along so well and our conversation on and off the court is great … we know there will be some competition this year but we think that we can take this.”
