Wednesday, Aug. 6, 2008
Bruce Burris, Seneca Valley's girls volleyball coach, sat on a folding chair just off the Discovery Sports Center court in Boyds Saturday, took a deep breath, and surveyed the scene.
Burris wasn't coaching his players, but playing himself, in the first annual Montgomery County Public School alumni volleyball championship. As a member of Springbrook's men's team, Burris, a 1984 graduate, was the oldest person there.
"This is fun, but it reminds me that I am the age that I am," Burris said as he stretched out his legs. "But I don't think there is a player out here that I haven't coached, played with or played against. The volleyball community in Montgomery County is tight, and once you're in it, you're in it for good."
The alumni tournament was the brainchild of three friends, Mike Yee, Victor Chan and Andrew Kiang ó all 24 years old ó who kept revisiting an argument five years in the making.
In 2002, Kiang's and Yee's Churchill team went undefeated during the boys volleyball regular season, only to lose to Chan's Wootton Patriots in the county championship. The argument as to which team was better was never settled.
"We kept talking trash," Kiang said. "We would argue about who was better for days on end, and sometimes we would bring other alumni into the argument. This year, we finally decided that organizing something would be a good thing to do."
Soon, the rematch between Wootton and Churchill materialized as a way to settle old scores. Kiang and Chan even came up with a slogan for the inaugural T-shirt: "bragging rights."
In the tight-knit volleyball community, word spread fast. And, then, with the help of the social networking Web site facebook.com, it spread even faster.
"Once we set up the page for the tournament on Facebook, it took off," Chan said. "If we didn't have that as a tool, we might have had half the people that we have here. But in that first week, 100 people joined the group. Two weeks later, we had 400."
Like that, the organizers had 10 men's teams and eight women's teams looking to settle old scores. The qualification was broad, but firmly enforced: Team members had to have played at least one season on the coed, girls or boys varsity programs and could not be current students.
By the time the championship arrived, an amalgam of players young and not-so-young took the court to claim a title that for the longest time was imaginary.
"It has been pretty fun," said Gena Hlavinka, The Gazette girls Player of the Year in 2007. "It's weird to hear some of the talk, because the rivalries that some of the other players had is totally different than the rivalries that we have now. It is cool to see how different the sport is now from then."
A 2008 graduate, Hlavinka was the youngest member of a Wootton team that included players from the 1990s. As her team squared off against Rockville, she took the court opposite current Quince Orchard girls coach Karen Jones, who played for the Rams before graduating in 1985.
Several stars from years past returned to show their stuff. On one court, Magruder's Taylor Herrgott returned to anchor the girls team, while on another, Gaithersburg's William Price, who plays at George Mason, showed off a wicked jump serve.
In the end, Churchill's men's team and Gaithersburg's women's team took home the titles; Churchill's Bryant Lee and Springbrook's Sherryta Stokes were tournament MVP's. But Chan expects that the arguments will continue.
"This tournament is not going to settle anything for good," he said. "These teams only get the keep the trophy for the next year, and then it'll be up for grabs again. We want to make this an annual thing and keep the rivalries going."
