Cal Athletics
Growth Evident As 2016 Training Camp Begins
Cal Beach Volleyball Team Raises Expectations
BERKELEY – The Cal beach volleyball team came into existence two years ago and featured a roster made up almost exclusively of indoor players that had never played on the sand.
They laid the ground work for the evolution of the program. On the first day of practice for the 2016 season, the growth the Bears have made since was strikingly apparent.
Eighteen student-athletes crowded into the Clark Kerr Sand Courts for a three-hour workout that focused mostly on fundamentals. The major difference between the beginning of training camp this year compared with 2014 is that most of the players already had a pretty good sense of the fundamentals.
That’s because head coach Meagan Schmitt and director of volleyball Rich Feller have since been recruiting strictly beach-only athletes, and with each passing year those athletes arrive in Berkeley with more and more experience in the sand game.
“Every year, we get more and more players that have been playing sand a long time,” said senior captain Sarah Cole, a transplant from the Bears’ indoor team. “These girls have been doing it longer than the girls who are here already. The freshmen this year have been doing it just as long as the seniors.”
Of the 18 student-athletes on Cal’s 2016 roster, only three have indoor volleyball experience with the Bears. Cole played for the Bears for two years before deciding this season to only play on the sand. Junior Sabrina Blackwell has played indoor for three years while sophomoreSammy Furlan played inside for just one year after being recruited primarily as a beach volleyball player.
In the past two years, Schmitt has brought in 12 student-athletes as beach-only prospects, and this year’s freshmen class features three players who have participated in the Team USA High Performance program – Grace Campbell of Manhattan Beach, Mia Merino of Tustin and Kaity Uythoven of Valencia.
“This group of incoming freshmen have had the most youth beach volleyball experience in their development,” Schmitt said. “Rather than teaching them the beach game, as a coaching staff we can refine their beach game and elevate it. They already have such a great amount of knowledge coming into the program.”
The addition of the freshmen, the continued development of last year’s class and the leadership provided by seniors Cole, Ashley Johnson and soccer-turned-beach volleyball athlete Kory Lamet has the Bears thinking big in the first season ever in which beach volleyball will be recognized as a championship sport by both the Pac-12 and NCAA. The first-ever Pac-12 championships will take place at the end of April at USC and the inaugural NCAA Championships will be held the following week in Gulf Shores, Alabama.
“I’m phenomenally excited,” said Cole, who played on the Bears’ No. 1 pair all last season. “This year, we have so much talent that I think it’s going to be a wake-up call for everyone. The freshmen are so good that you are going to have to work hard to keep your spot that you may have been so comfortable in last year. Every single day you are going to have to fight for your spot. It’s going to be way more competitive.”
The Bears open the season March 4-5 at the Arizona Invitational. Their first home match is a tri-meet with Pacific and San Francisco on March 15.
“It was great to be out here this morning,” Schmitt said. “The girls put in a lot of hard work this fall which led us to feeling like we established a culture that we want for the upcoming season. We want to have excellence expected in every moment in our program, whether it be in the weight room, on the courts or in the classroom. It’s become the norm for this program.”
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