Howland boys volleyball seeing growth in team’s 1st season
Tigers have area’s only boys volleyball program in first year as OHSAA sport
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HOWLAND -- Athletics have been a big part of Brandon Null's life.
Null, a senior at Howland, has played for the Tigers' basketball team and competes in cross country and track. But when Null joined the Tigers boys volleyball team, a newly sanctioned sport in the Ohio High School Athletic Association's spring 2023 slate, it was unlike any team he had ever been on.
"It's the same for everyone on the team, no one really has any past experience," Null said. "For me personally, I've really only ever played with friends, just like messing around. We have a sand volleyball court at our park, so like I messed around and played with them this past summer, but that's really it."
While this is the first season of OHSAA sanctioned boys volleyball, many schools across the state have previously had club teams for boys to compete on.
Schools like St. Ignatius in Cleveland and Hudson High School in Hudson have had boys club volleyball teams for over a decade. That is not the case for the Tigers. Like Null, none of the Howland's players have ever seriously played volleyball. They are starting from the ground floor.
"It's going to be a long ride," Null said. "We're starting from the bottom and we're trying to make it. We're trying to be a decent team by the end of the year."
As they attempt to learn how to play the game at a competitive level, the Tigers are fortunate to be led by their head coach Amanda Florek.
Florek is also the coach of Howland's girls volleyball team and has years of experience at her disposal. Coaching the boys team has been a unique experience for Florek as she has had to take her players back to the basics.
"It's been very interesting," Florek said. "We literally went straight to the basics that I usually teach because I'm the girls coach on the other side in the fall. We went straight to the skills that we would be teaching our junior high and our elementary kids. They pick it up very quickly. We'll teach an aspect of the game, and it seems like the next day the lightbulbs are going off, and they know how to apply it to game situations."
Along with working on fundamentals, Florek has looked for other unique methods for training her players, including bringing in members of the girls team to scrimmage the boys in practice. The Tigers have responded well to Florek's coaching style.
"Coach Amanda is a great coach," Null said. "She knows a lot about the sport since she's the girls coach and she's done a really good job with them. She's brought the girls team in to play against us and she also just has a lot of knowledge about the sport. Most of the practices have just been going over basic stuff, but I think she thinks once we get that stuff down, we can be a solid team."
Despite the team's lack of experience, Howland began the season with a win in the program's first ever game, beating Notre Dame-Cathedral Latin 2-1 in a tournament match on March 18. Later that day, the Tigers experienced the first losses in their volleyball careers, losing 2-0 to Archbishop Hoban and then 2-0 to Berkshire.
Regardless of winning or losing, the Tigers season-opening tournament was a great way for the players to experience real-game action.
"It was a really good experience for the guys to see what the flow of the game is like," Florek said. "You can only simulate so much of that in the gym. We were really only on our third week of full practices and we had no scrimmage. ...I think it was a really good learning experience from the get-go, we came in and competed with all the teams."
One of the struggles that Howland has faced is a lack of local competition. The nearest competitor to the Tigers is the Berkshire Badgers, whose school is about a 30-mile drive from Howland. The Tigers' travel schedule for volleyball has been more strenuous than in other sports.
"It's definitely strange," Null said. "For other sports, at least the one's I play, not every game is going to be 40 minutes to an hour drive like these ones are. That's the only thing that stinks about it."
Florek believes that as other schools in the area see how the Tigers volleyball team operates, they may look to pick up the sport as well.
"A lot of schools I think are going to say 'hey, Howland has interest, let's test the waters at our school,'" she said. "I have no doubt it's going to grow exponentially in the next few years. On the girls' side of things, there is huge interest. There's a huge club following as well, so I have no doubt the boys are going to do the same."
The OHSAA boys volleyball postseason starts in early May, and the Tigers hope to continue getting better until that point.
No matter how their season ends, Howland's players were excited to be a part of the inaugural season.
"I think it's cool that we were one of the first schools in our area to have a team," Null said. "I think in the future, there will be more teams for sure."
mcole@tribtoday.com