No home gym, no problem. Herron boys volleyball penning underdog story.

Jude Deemer played baseball, basketball and soccer growing up. Nothing clicked for him, though, like volleyball. By sixth grade, Deemer knew this was his sport.

“I just loved it,” he said. “Something clicked with it. I thought, ‘I want to get really good at this. This is my thing.’”

Deemer jumped into the club volleyball world by the time he was 13. After attending St. Roch Catholic school through middle school, he enrolled at Herron for high school. Every year during the club volleyball season, he told his teammates to “watch out for Herron High School.”

“I would always joke with them, ‘This is our year,’” Deemer said. “‘You’ll see us.’ I liked to advertise us a lot in any way I can.”

Herron, a nationally recognized public charter school with an outstanding academic reputation (ranked in the top 3% in the nation of public schools in 2023 by U.S. News and World Report), does not have much of an athletic pedigree. The sweet sounds of victory are normally associated with the school’s classical, liberal arts education.

Since joining the Indiana High School Athletic Association in 2006, Herron has won two sectional titles in athletics — boys soccer in 2017 and ’18. That’s it. The boys volleyball team can not officially change that this year; the IHSAA approved boys volleyball and girls wrestling as officially recognized sports starting in 2024-25.

Herron, owners of a 20-8 record going into Thursday night’s first round sectional game against Washington, is making Deemer look like he knew what he was talking about all along. Despite lacking a home gym of its own or transportation to games, the program is making noise. Coach Mark Benbow, a “gym rat” who grew up playing basketball for his father, Bob, a former standout at tiny Roll High School in Blackford County in the 1950s, smiled to himself after telling his team during a timeout Saturday at a tournament, “Don’t get caught watching the paint dry.”

Fitting that there is a little “Hoosiers” baked into this underdog program.

“That was the way my dad coached,” Benbow said. “Always moving, always motion, keep going. Move the ball around. Five passes. That sort of thing. My dad always coached the youth leagues, which is probably why I’m doing it.”

Benbow, who owns a construction company and still plays sand volleyball, previously coached at Mt. Vernon as an assistant for Eric Bulmahn, who led the program to seven 20-win seasons and two sectional titles in his eight years as coach before stepping down in 2022. The year before, Benbow volunteered to coach the boys team at Herron after finding out through Deemer the team might not be able to play because they did not have a coach.

Right away, Benbow realized this experience might be a little different. The team rents out the gym at Municipal Gardens from Indy Parks for practices.

“The kids get their own rides for practices and to games,” he said. “Sometimes it’s hard for some of them to make it if we have a long way to go for an away game. We had a game at Columbus East a couple kids couldn’t make it. It’s really up to the parents and kids.”

Herron went just 7-16 that first year, then improved to 19-16 in 2022 and 14-12 in 2023. Steady progress. Benbow calls four players, seniors who have been with him since their freshman year, the “Fab Four.” In addition to the 6-4 Deemer, the team’s star player, that group includes Mikey Reideman, Jack Wagner and Quinn O’Brien.

“Playing together for four years,” Deemer said, “we’ve been able to work some things out. We have better chemistry, definitely. We’ve basically had the same team for two years now, which is extremely rare for any high school team.”

Reideman, who carries a weighted 4.8 grade-point average and plans to attend Rose-Hulman to major in chemical engineering, had played volleyball with Deemer and O'Brien at St. Roch before coming to Herron. But once in high school, Reideman blossomed and became much more serious about the sport.

“I love letting off steam, honestly,” he said. “I try not to be a very competitive, angry person. But when you get a good hit or block or something, there’s nothing like that feeling when you slam the ball as hard as you can. It’s a great excuse to let out a little violence in your life. It’s like, ‘Oh, I needed that.’”

Letting off steam is one thing. Winning while doing it is another. Herron started the season 0-3 before picking it up and taking a seven-game winning streak into match against Westfield, the state’s fifth-ranked team, last week. Herron won the first two sets, 25-23 and 25-14. Westfield answered back to win the next two sets, 25-18 and 25-17.

“They’ve always handed our butts to us,” Reideman said. “So, I think we definitely caught them by surprise. They have a lot of funding, and we don’t even have a gym, but it’s fun to be the underdog.”

Herron answered back to win a dramatic fifth set, 17-15, and take the match. It felt like a national championship of sorts for the Achaeans. “Probably the best win the program has ever had,” Benbow said. Two days later, in a tournament at Zionsville, Herron knocked off Avon, Lafayette Jeff and Zionsville. The winning streak ended with a 2-0 loss to Boone Grove, a 26-6 team that is seeded first in its sectional.

“It was a tough 36 hours,” Benbow said. “But Saturday was a really good day. Those tournaments are good for you because they bring your team closer. You spend the whole day together. We came out a little flat and tired against Zionsville, but we came out and destroyed in the second set and did what we should have been doing the whole day.”

Herron knocked off Heritage Christian 3-1 and Shortridge 3-0 this week to close out the regular season. The former match was moved to Heritage Christian on Tuesday because Municipal Gardens is a voting center. “Same thing happened last year,” Benbow said with a laugh.

Herron will go into sectional play in the final year before boys volleyball is a recognized IHSAA sport as the No. 3 seed in a six-team sectional at Southport. The host Cardinals and Franklin Central, ranked No. 8 and 9 in the state, respectively, are the top two seeds in the sectional.

“It’s a little disappointing we’re going to graduate before it becomes an IHSAA sport,” Deemer said. “But it’s definitely awesome to see it approved as a full-on sport. I’m really glad to see it growing in any capacity at all. The fact that I’ve played it for so long and it started to grow around the time I started playing is really cool. I’m happy to see it happen.”

Deemer, who leads Herron with 245 kills and second on the team in blocks to junior Gideon Nelson (118 blocks) with 116, plans to play volleyball in college. He said he is considering Wabash, California Lutheran and Hobart and William Smith in New York.

“He’s a jack of all trades,” Reideman said. “He moves around the court and can do anything you need him to do. He saved me from so many bad sets and still puts it down. It’s crazy. It’s been fun to work with him all these years.”

But most of Herron’s players have stories more similar to Reideman. It is a team full of players with little experience, pulled together by a coach who drives 45 minutes from home every day after work to lead practices at a gym that is not on campus.

Herron will try to keep its underdog story going Friday night against Franklin Central. The sectional championship is set for Saturday at 11 a.m.

“It’s fun to come out and compete and play against the big teams,” Reideman said. “The teamwork and everybody working together is one of the main driving factors of what makes us a real team. We’re a real team now.”

Call Star reporter Kyle Neddenriep at (317) 444-6649.

This article originally appeared on Indianapolis Star: Herron boys volleyball writing underdog story ahead of sectional play