The Mount Vernon varsity volleyball squad is going to look different this year.
Head coach Maggie Willems, now in her 17th season with the Mustangs, and 11th as head coach, says this year’s team will feature a lot of new faces, but that doesn’t mean they won’t be tough.
The 2020-21 squad ended the season with a 34-7 record and second place in Class 3A.
Only two players from last season’s varsity rotation are back.
“This year’s team is going to look very different than our teams of the last couple of years,” said Willems.
“We have young players that will step into our lineup, but I think that it’s important that these young players are highly skilled and very experienced as well.”
Though her team this season has a lot of fresh faces, Willems has no plans to start taking it easy on them.
Volleyball is unusual in the amount of flexibility coaches have to choose their opponents, Willems indicated. As she does every year, Willems sought the toughest matchups she could — and that includes conference opponents.
“The WaMac East itself is full of elite volleyball programs in the state,” Willems said. “Not just good, but the very best.”
This is one of the reasons Willems picks the toughest teams to challenge.
“You don’t know what you need to do to be the best you can be if you aren’t playing the best opponent across the net,” she said.
“To be frank, we have, I would argue, the toughest schedule of any team that’s in Class 3A. The reality of our schedule is, there are no breaks. Every match, or every tournament, provides a pretty steep challenge. That is the intent, or design, of what we do,” said Willems.
This includes six straight Saturdays of tournaments in addition to several games each week, as well as The Fall Classic, a tournament of Willems’ creation where the competition is as steep as can be.
The new season will be different in another ways, indicated Willems, thanks to the tricky previous season, and its necessity for improvisation.
“Something really unique about Covid is for the first time, I think, ever, suddenly our schedule became fluid. So it allowed us to think of things a different way. And we went ahead and added a tournament inviting who we perceived the best opponents that we wanted to play.”
The unpredictable nature of the season allowed her and the team “to think a little differently,” a skill Willems thinks will benefit an already talented Mustangs team in a field full of talented teams.