Summit volleyball switches goals from championship to enjoyment

“We would have been making a really good run at the state championship,” Waskom said. “It is not often that you have depth.”

But due to the effects of COVID-19, there will be no state championships this season.

“It sucks of course to not have the same opportunity to have a chance to make the state title this year,” said junior Hannah Kendall. “But it is nice to be back in the gym and I think we are making the most of what we have.”

The past year has been all about continuously making adjustments and finding the positives when all high school sports in Oregon were canceled for nearly an entire year.

Still, it is only natural for a team to think of what could have been for a group that had been playing together since grade school.

“It is bitter sweet not to go back to the state tournament for one more time,” said senior Hannah Sauer. “It is always so different from other tournaments and the season because it is so competitive and all the best teams are there. It is sad that I won’t get to experience that again.”

This year would have been a new challenge for the Storm.

Since moving up and joining the Class 6A ranks in 2018, the perennial 5A state title contender found itself in a similar position in the state’s highest classification — in the state tournament where the state’s best teams and players meet.

“You get there and the girls there are 5 inches taller than the girls you have played all season,” said senior Harper Justema. “We are typically the only team not from Portland, so there are about 300 kids from Portland teams who band together and cheer against you, and you have the sheer magnitude of 600 people cheering against you.”

Although the Storm have advanced to the final weekend of the season in previous years, they have yet to break through in 6A. In six tournament games the past two seasons, the Storm have only won two matches and have yet to reach the championship match, as they have six times under Waskom, hoisting the 5A state championship trophy in 2011 and 2015.

It was not long after walking off the courts at Liberty High School at the 6A state tournament in 2019 that Summit aimed its focus at taking down the Portland-area schools and claiming a state championship.

Then COVID-19 came to the United States, and high school sports seasons were postponed and postponed again. Practices were sporadic, sometimes months apart from one another. And once they started back up, the decision was made not to host state championships — a blow to a team with title aspirations.

For seniors Justema and Sauer, this year’s season is not one they envisioned — rowdy fans in the stands for the biggest games and working toward the end goal of a title.

The new high school reality was no more apparent than when Summit faced off against cross-town rival Bend High last week. Normally a full gym for when the Lava Bears and Storm face off, this time it was an empty gym.

“We have one of the bigger student sections that you will see at a volleyball game, but it is just a totally different picture,” Justema said.

Normally a crowd helps deliver energy to the players, but not this year with the limited crowd capacity. Yet the five-set match — which Bend High nearly stole after falling behind 2-0 — was as intense has they have been in the past with packed gyms. Summit won the fifth-and-decisive game to claim the match 3-2.

“It is super different, we have to create our own energy,” said junior Kate Doorn. “One of our goals is to stay super loud because there isn’t a student section to be loud for us. In a way it makes it more intense because we have to focus on volleyball when there are no fans.”

Justema, Sauer, Kendall and Doorn all said that what made this team a championship contender was not just the team’s physical traits or past success, but the chemistry it has been able to foster, especially over the last year.

The Storm’s goal has shifted from a state title to simply enjoying the time with one another. If there is one thing they have learned the last year, it’s that time together is not always guaranteed.

“I love this team and everyone loves each other so much,” Kendall said. “It makes it special because we all play for each other because we don’t know when it is going to continue or if it is going to stop. So we push each other every moment and enjoy every moment of it.”