By most measures, the Sapulpa volleyball team’s participation in the Catoosa Summer League throughout June must be considered a success.
The varsity squad went 19-5 over the course of the four-week league, while the Chieftains’ JV team put together an even better 22-2 record, as each team played against other area teams from a wide range of competitive levels. Just about the only drawback was that one key player got hurt, but hopefully, it isn’t too serious.
“Summer league was a pretty good success for us,” said Sapulpa coach Cory Harp. “It’s before our preseason, before our season opens up, we take two teams, it’s four Thursdays in a row in June. There’s a whole mixture of teams, there’s some pretty good teams that we played.”
The official opening practice for the upcoming 2023 season is coming up in just a couple of weeks (the first day is July 17 with the season opener on August 7), so it was a valuable experience for the team to get some playing time, learn new teammates, develop team chemistry and just get back in the swing of playing volleyball again.
“With it being kind of our preseason, it’s basically a time that the girls come and get extra reps and get playing time and get an opportunity to touch the volleyball, but it’s not mandatory,” Harp said of the summer league. “Every team may have a kid or two on vacation this week or miss a kid for basketball the next week, so we try it just as a little precursor to our season, to get in the gym, have a little fun. Different teams approach it a little bit differently, but our main objective, the reason why we play in it, why we put both our JV and our varsity teams in the league, is just to kind of knock off some of that rust and just enjoy playing together, give us a chance to bond and do some fun things together before we go into our season.”
For a team that went 22-17 last year and reached the Class 5A state quarterfinals for the third straight season, the Chieftains have high hopes and figure to be in the mix once again. They lost possibly their best player from last season, standout athlete Stailee Heard, and one other senior starter, but Harp thinks the team might actually be better overall than in 2022.
“Stailee Heard will be hard to replace, but we’re almost in a position that every spot except for hers we’re a little bit better at,” Harp said. “We have three seniors this year, with Tyla Heard and Jailey Battles, so pretty small class. Our junior class this year is huge. We’ve got a handful of solid, young players that I think are going to contribute somewhere. Overall, I think we may be a little more talented this year than we were last year. How that manifests itself in the season and where we finish, it’s tough to predict.”
The Catoosa Summer League showed Harp that two players in particular improved significantly since last season, after playing club volleyball during the off-season months. Now he has big expectations for junior Brooklyn Kuster, and Battles, who will share the senior leadership role with Tyla Heard.
“Brooklyn Kuster, she played in a little bit of a smaller role for us on varsity last year, and played for a really good club volleyball team in the off-season this year and just made a ton of progress,” Harp said. “Jailey Battles, her and Tyla are two of our three seniors and are to play huge roles. Tyla’s probably our all-around best player now, certainly our best offensive weapon up at the net, and then Jailey is our setter. She did a great job last year and she played for a really good, competitive team in the off-season, gained a lot of experience. She’s a great offensive presence out there for us.”
The biggest negative from the Catoosa competition was the knee injury suffered by outside hitter Raeni Tucker, but Harp didn’t think it was going to be too serious. And even if it keeps her out of action for a little while, it will give other players opportunities to step into a bigger role.
“We don’t think it’s serious, we think it’s just a slight tear in her meniscus, and I think she’s going to be back ready for the start of the season,” Harp said of Tucker. “Depending on what the status on that is, it may be kind of a baptism by fire for some of these younger sophomores that we have coming up. We’re pretty confident that it’s not going to be something that’s going to jeopardize her season. Maybe a little bit of a slow start to it, but we think she’s going to be fine.
She’s had a good off-season and was definitely on her way to having a really strong season.”
