Parity emerges in boys volleyball ahead of KHSAA’s sanctioning of the sport next year
When there’s a roof between the game and thunder, weather delays don’t cross one’s mind at all.
A spring downpour outside was easily drowned out by the raucous fans of four high schools — Lafayette, Paul Laurence Dunbar, St. Xavier and Trinity — trying to lift their teams to a state championship. In the end, those who cheered the loudest watched their team leave with a hard-earned runner-up trophy.
St. Xavier, unbeaten against Kentucky competition in 2024, remained so on its way to 3-0 victory against Dunbar on Thursday night in the Kentucky Volleyball Coaches Association Boys State Tournament championship at Western Hills High School. The Tigers won their third straight KVCA title.
Their success is, as much as anything, a testament to the seriousness with which boys in the Louisville area have taken the sport. But Thursday’s semifinals and finals showed that the gap between Louisville’s private schools and others in the state might not be as cavernous as it has traditionally been on the girls’ side. For a sport making a rapid jump from club participation to official KHSAA sanctioning, that can only be encouraging.
“Normally I would say Trinity and DeSales are really our only competitors in the state,” St. X senior Cooper Thomas said. “But this year Paul Dunbar was amazing and Lafayette challenged us. It’s definitely growing and the skill level’s improving across the state.”
The Generals took a set off the Tigers in the semifinals, joining Dunbar and Trinity as the only in-state teams to manage that this year. It briefly appeared as if it’d be the only set either Lexington public school would get on the night; on the opposite court, Dunbar trailed Trinity 2-0 in their semifinal while the Tigers stormed out to a convincing lead in their third set with Lafayette.
But the Bulldogs hung in. Set three: 25-22, Dogs. The gap widened in set four, 25-18. By the time Dunbar was up 6-3 in the decisive fifth set, Lafayette’s match was over and its fans roared for a city rival. A 15-10 victory sealed a stunning comeback for a rag-tag group of athletes with minuscule organized volleyball experience.
“These boys have had a long season,” Dunbar head coach Abigail Shafer said. “This is not any of their first sports, except for one of them, so the work that they’ve put in this whole season has been phenomenal. There was a lot of great volleyball played tonight.”
Two of the top players in Dunbar’s rotation, William Naehr and Seneca Oddo, are great swimmers. Oddo, just a few months removed from tying a state sprint record, will compete in the pool next year for Florida State University. He got turned on to volleyball through “Haikyu!!,” a popular manga and anime, and Naehr, whose family are local volleyball legends. His aunt, Tina Naehr, still holds multiple records at the University of Louisville since graduating in 1994. His father, Tim, played club ball for Trinity.
William didn’t give the family tradition a serious go until Dunbar started its club varsity program in the thick of the COVID-19 pandemic. A local club, Bluegrass Lightning, sprouted the same year, and others have since joined it. With those operations still in their infancy, the achievements of nascent Lexington programs are even more impressive.
“How many of those kids (at St. X and Trinity) play year-round volleyball? We have one kid,” said Jenni Morgan, a Dunbar assistant coach. “All of these kids are swimmers, soccer players, working jobs. This is an eclectic group who came into volleyball because of their friends or they were looking for something else to do. This is just something that they fell in love with.”
Growing the sport
A little over 40 schools participated in the KVCA season this spring, which started after the end of the high school basketball season in March. The KHSAA’s proposed season calendar, up for adoption in July, would allow practices to begin the first week of February and games the first week of March.
That could lead to some on-campus scheduling headaches as basketball’s postseason ramps up, but boys volleyball should largely enjoy the same advantage it does right now: its playing surface is widely available in the spring. Between that and the fact that most net systems should be compatible with the boys game (it requires slightly higher positioning), the only real barrier to entry is interest within the halls.
To date, the sport hasn’t been adopted widely outside of the “golden triangle” of Louisville, Lexington and Cinci-tucky. Buckhorn, located in Perry County and among the lightest-enrolled schools in the state, fielded a team this season. So did Fleming County, located about 75 minutes from Lexington. Both it and Southwestern High School in Somerset finished with .500 records, according to results available on MaxPreps.
“Given the growth we’ve had in terms of the interest level that we’ve got and the KHSAA’s got, we have the interest,” said Brad Wilson, secretary and treasurer for the KVCA. “And with it being a sanctioned varsity sport next year, I think people are gonna continue to jump on board. I just knew the appetite was there. You give the guys an opportunity, they’re not playing a spring sport or may not love other things, and it works itself out.
“All it really takes is a commitment from coaches and administrations to say, ‘Yes, we’re going to invest the time and money and interest to make it happen.’”
Still, in the early going, “want to” can be difficult to translate into sustainable action for schools in places like Buckhorn. If yours is the only program fielding a boys volleyball team within a two-hour radius, interest can wane quickly. Wilson and others around the sport are optimistic that enough teams will develop over time in rural areas that they can maintain programs, possibly traveling collectively to weekend tournaments as needed to build out their schedules. A pessimist could point to a sport like soccer, whose growth remains stagnant-to-nonexistent in portions of the state.
The KVCA will likely continue to offer a junior varsity tournament and/or a tournament for emerging teams who don’t quite feel ready for KHSAA competition, Wilson said, to continue encouraging growth.
Regardless of how statewide adoption pans out, it’s clear that boys volleyball is on the upswing in Kentucky’s biggest cities. This year, experienced Louisvillians ruled, but it’s not difficult to imagine a public school in the championship circle. The overall level of competitiveness in Thursday’s matches was markedly improved from last year’s tournament finale held at Henry Clay High School.
“Two years ago, these teams couldn’t hang with either of these teams from Louisville,” Wilson said. “It wasn’t even close. If you give enough athletic guys in the gym enough practice time and touches of the ball, the sky’s the limit.”
And when the sky opens up, fans won’t ever need to reach for their umbrellas.
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