By Trevor Jackson
VOLLEYBALL in the South East is about to make history, with the first women’s representative team set to head interstate in March.
A team from the South East Volleyball Association will head to the Warrnambool Seaside Tournament on the long weekend in March in the hope to gain valuable experience and a possible title.
“For the first time in our history we have decided to send a women’s team away,” South East volleyball president Ben Clark said.
“We have some good numbers in the women’s ranks and a few more high school girls playing in our competition now.
“We think there is enough depth there to have a women’s team playing in tournaments.”
It is a big jump straight into the Warrnambool competition, which Clark said had been running for around 50 years.
“It is a pretty big competition,” he said.
“A lot of other state leagues send their teams to play as a warm up before they start their state league campaigns.
“You get teams from everywhere, Melbourne, Victoria, Adelaide all meeting in the same spot.”
The association usually sends a men’s team to the tournament but with some of the top players moving away for various reasons, leaving the women to fly the flag for the region alone.
“We lost a lot of our good players to Adelaide, so this was going to be a rebuilding year for the men,” Clark said.
“We will look to send a men’s team to the Country Championships later in the year.
“We are really excited for the women and I know they are excited too.
“The enthusiasm at training is electric.”
The women will compete in a lower division at the tournament but Clark said the experience would be invaluable to the players and the competition here in the Limestone Coast.
“The competition they will play against, they would not have faced anything like that before,” he said.
“We think they will put up a good show.
“We only started our season this week but they have been doing well at training and we have a good mixture of height, athleticism and ages which is good.
“This is about learning how to play competition volleyball, then bringing those skills back to our competition to help teach the younger ones coming through.”
Volleyball in the Limestone Coast has continued to grow, with 16 teams currently competing on the domestic stage.
Clark said the biggest growth was through high school girls wanting to play, which bodes well for the future of the sport in the region.
He said that helped make the decision to create and send a team away to Warrnambool.
“It is good we can now offer this pathway to women to represent the region in sport and be proud of it,” Clark said.
“We have built a close connection with Volleyball SA and they will send some coaches down to do specialist clinics with us.
“We will identify some of our top prospects in the boys and girls ranks in juniors and send them to Adelaide in the holidays.
“All the kids in the region will now have access to high-level coaching.”
With training well underway and a couple more weeks before the Warrnambool tournament, Clark said the excitement was certainly building.
“We only started our in-house competition on Monday and are really just starting to get into it,” he said.
“Because we have never had a representative female team ever, now is their time to shine and do us proud.”
