WHITEHALL — Because of the number of Whitehall volleyball players who participate in club volleyball, the Vikings don’t have many chances to get together during the offseason. Coach Ted Edsall also believes in giving his athletes a break, so he usually doesn’t do much in the way of organized activities early in the summers, apart from a weekly open gym.
That added a special layer of significance to the Vikings’ youth camp, which kicked off last Thursday with concurrent sessions for kids from third through fifth grade and for junior high kids, followed by a later session for high school age players. About two dozen girls from the younger set joined several varsity Vikings to learn the game - a big jump, Edsall said, from last year, when nine from the same age group came out.
“An unbelievable increase in numbers,” Edsall said. “I don’t know why. I also have parents that I coached in the stands, so that’s part of it. It may be just a group of fifth and sixth-graders whose parents are involved. We had a bunch of kids sign up at the end. We’ve got a kid from Chicago and a kid from Florida who are on vacation here. We’ve got an older kid here from Bloomington, Indiana who’s really good. We welcome them all. It’s fun.”
The younger players certainly benefited from the seven varsity Vikings who were there to help for the first session of the camp, which included all five of the team’s returning seniors, but it was those varsity players, Edsall said, who built the most lasting memories from the camp.
“For them to give back, they’ll talk about it for a long time,” Edsall said. “Sometimes it’s a chore to get here, but when they get here and see the look on those kids’ faces that they’re helping, there’s nothing like it...They’re like their heroes, the kids that have played volleyball.”
Whitehall’s own season preparation ramped up Sunday-Wednesday with its own team camp. The Vikings’ team will likely look a little different this year after the graduation of the two top attackers, Arianna Black and Kayla Mulder. Senior setter Sidney Shepherd, an all-conference performer, is likely to be the centerpiece of the team, and the Vikings will look for solid attackers to emerge from a typically talented group of newcomers.
Edsall often goes with the flow, and true to that perspective, he’s not sweating the uncertainty of who will be hitting the most spikes for Whitehall this fall.
“We’re going to be fine,” Edsall said. “There aren’t any championships won in August...We have a nice core back. We’ve got an all-conference player in Sid. We have five seniors. We’re going to supplement them with some good players. It’s going to be different. We’re probably not going to have the attacking that we had last year, but I think we’re going to be competitive.”
