Do you want to build a boys volleyball team?
Glynn Academy psychology teacher Jesse Knowles has had that desire since the Georgia High School Association first floated the idea of sanctioning the sport.
Though that day is still two years away, the Terrors aren’t waiting to get the ball rolling. The Glynn Academy boys volleyball club team competed in a club tournament this past weekend in College Park, where they scored the program’s first victory.
“It’s one of those things where it’s nice to be the first at something, and these guys are the first at something,” Knowles said of the inaugural roster of 24. “I like to try to give as much credit to the kids who come out and do the work. You can have good coaches and bad coaches, but if you can build a culture where kids come out and get excited about it, I just like to take a backseat and watch them go.”
Knowles has already proven his ability to do just that. He has helped Glynn Academy get its E-sports program off the ground as coach of the fledgling GHSA-sanctioned sport, and he is partially responsible for an established culture of success permeating through the girls volleyball program.
Asked to coach the Glynn Academy girls in 2003, Knowles took his first job and ran with it.
“After 10 years, they had amassed nine straight trips to the playoffs and a handful of region tournaments,” Knowles said. “The win percentage was north of 70, so we became a really, really good team.”
Although Knowles eventually backed off from coaching full-time to spend time with his family and raising young children, he continued to lend his hand to the program from time to time.
But when the GHSA finally put out feelers gauging the interest in boys volleyball in south Georgia a few years ago, Knowles couldn’t resist getting involved.
He was a late entrant to the sport himself, introduced to volleyball as a college freshman and immediately falling in love. Even while coaching the Terrors’ girls program, he fielded interest from male students in forming their own squad.
“The idea of boys has always been around,” Knowles said. “Even if you’re a girls coach, even as early as 2007 you’d hear, ‘Coach Knowles, why don’t we have boys team?’”
Out of the nearly two dozen programs interested in starting up a boys program, only four were able to get one off the ground, Glynn Academy included.
Administration green lit the venture without second thought. Then the recruiting began.
“I just put it out there — a couple kids in class, a couple kids I taught,” Knowles said. “In our cafeteria we have all these tables set up for clubs and stuff like that, so I put an unmanned table out there that said, ‘Tired of talking about it. Tired of hearing how good you are at volleyball. Sign up. Show me.’ Something like that. There were 30-40 names on it…
“Even after it was all said and done, we had a solid 19. I had two teams worth.”
Between conflicting athletic obligation and overzealous prospective players, the roster was culled to an enthusiastic bunch — Daniel Smiley, Blake Nelson, Alex Packard, Collin “Code Red” Register, Jeremiah Watkins, Xavier O’Neill, Zion Jones, Lucas Ketcham, Raymond “Kills” Mills, Henry Thompson, John “The Matrix” McCleod, Ryan Walsh, Angel Garcia-Garcia, Maurice Kitchen, Jose Martinez-Ruiz, Zackery Miller, Donovan Mock, Dylan Mock, Anthony Tortorete, Chase Warren, Brantley Wilson, Maui Stutzer and Robert Kasper — eager to learn the sport despite minimal experience.
And there hasn’t been much time to gain more. After having the first official team meeting Feb. 23, the Glynn Academy boys club volleyball team played its first tournament in Jacksonville just 33 days later.
The Terrors competed against a handful of sanctioned Florida schools and walked away winless.
“We came close a couple of times,” Knowles said. “Then a couple of teams showed us exactly where we would be in the future. But it was OK. It was a great experience.”
Ultimately, the experience is the most important part of this season for a roster made up of 15 seniors.
Smiley is a college football signee at Centre College, who also competed for the Terrors’ wrestling and track and field teams throughout his prep career. But a volleyball anime Haikyu got the multi-sport athlete interested in adding a fourth to his resume before graduation.
“I wanted to do it all four years,” Smiley said. “I wanted to do it the whole time.”
Like nearly the entire team, playing competitive volleyball is a completely new experience. As of a few months ago, Smiley was entirely self taught.
“I kind of taught myself before because I would play casually with my family and stuff,” Smiley said. “But really just watching some volleyball, like the arm swing and the jump, I kind of figured out how to do that on my own.”
Originally an outside hitter for the team, Smiley has become perhaps the most important player as its setter, directing the action on the floor.
Only six members of Glynn Academy’s current roster will still be in high school when the boys volleyball becomes a sanctioned sport, but the team has still found plenty to play for.
They want to be the spark that ignites the program at the school, and they took a step toward doing that in College Park.
Despite dropping both matches in pool play, Glynn Academy put up a fight against both East Coweta and Harrison before being assigned to the bronze bracket, where the program would score its first win over Allatoona B.
Glynn lost the first set 25-18 before clawing back to win the second and third sets in dramatic fashion 25-23 and 15-12.
The Terrors hope it was the first triumph of many in the future of the program as the prepare to hit the recruiting trails hard again next year.
“It’s trying to navigate that, and then promote it to where guys are interested in saying, ‘OK, I really want to put that time in,’” Knowles said.