The Edward Little girls volleyball squad started on a whim, became a club team, was elevated to junior varsity status last year, and now is heading for the big time — varsity-level competition this season.
Edward Little head coach Scott Berube said interest is the key to becoming a varsity team.
“You have to have enough interest, and then you have to apply to the MPA … (and there’s) a waiting period, and during that time, you have to show potential to sustain a varsity team,” Berube explained.
Berube said Christy Keep, whose daughter Abigail plays on the team, had a hand in starting the team. Keep, who is a physical education teacher at Auburn Middle School, will be the team’s junior varsity coach.
Keep said she was talked into helping the team by her friend Lori Duplissis and her daughter, Elizabeth, to get a volleyball program together.
Keep admitted she didn’t know anything about coaching volleyball.
“I researched, a lot of research,” she said. “They (team) started teaching me what they knew, and I started watching videos and reading and doing all the things to figure it out all on my own. By the second year, I had gotten the hang of it.
“I quickly started coming up with ideas with practice and becoming more like a team.”
Keep believes the Red Eddies are indeed ready to move to the next level of play.
“I think it was just time,” Keep said. “They’ve been working hard for the last couple of years. I have a few that have been on the team for all three of years that I coached, and they have been working hard and deserve that opportunity to play some higher-level teams.”
Berube agrees with Keep that Edward Little has earned the opportunity to play varsity ball.
“Thanks to the great support of our principal, our superintendent and our athletic director, we kept the wheels moving and qualified for a varsity team this year,” Berube said. “We will be playing schools like Maranacook, Hampden Academy, Deering High School, Portland High School, Yarmouth, Brunswick.”
Berube added that Keep didn’t want the responsibility of coaching the varsity team and settled on being the JV coach.
“I’ve known the girls that I have watched them,” Berube said, “…and in the meantime, I had coached Central Maine Community College for a year, but couldn’t continue because of my job schedule. But when I got back into teaching, I became a collegiate and high school official for a couple of years and watched the game, and then I got a job at EL.”
Berube told Edward Little athletic director Todd Sampson that if the position ever came up, he wanted Sampson to know he was interested. In the middle of the summer, Berube was asked to coach the volleyball team and he agreed to take the job.
“The girls have worked so hard and are a real tight-knit group,” Berube said. “The girls really support each other, and they are really looking forward to getting it going with some varsity games.”
He said the volleyball program is also good for Edward Little in another way.
“A lot of the kids that didn’t play soccer or field hockey, and with such a large population at Edward Little … it gave the girls an outlet to get active and learn something new and come together and play,” he said.
There are two players — senior Yolly San Pedro and junior Kiara Bushman — who are among the group who can’t wait to take a crack at varsity teams.
“It is the best opportunity to ever get,” San Pedro said. “We have been working so hard to literally get to where we are now. We were scared it was never going to happen, but knowing this is happening this year, it is so exciting and so scary at the same time.”
Bushman said it was exciting to hear the Red Eddies had made it to the varsity level.
“Knowing that we can level up and play like more challenging teams made me happy,” Bushman said. “There is always going to be that pressure, but I am ready for it.”
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