BRUNSWICK

After a fairly quiet summer, the Brunswick High School gym was busy again on Tuesday — though, it wasn’t your usual suspects.

For the first time in the program’s history, varsity volleyball will be an official sport this fall. With the new team comes a totally new schedule, a handful of new players and a new head coach, Kaili Phillips.

Phillips, who’s been playing volleyball since she was seven, grew up in Saskatchewan, Canada, where volleyball is very popular. She played year-round through high school, eventually earning a volleyball scholarship to the University of Maine in Orono. Before taking the job at Brunswick this summer, she coached at Biddeford High School and Thornton Academy in Saco.

She’ll be trying to turn a club team that’s been around for just three years into another Brunswick athletic powerhouse.

“Volleyball is becoming a really big sport in this state,” Phillips said. “When I came here a lot of years ago, there were seven teams. Now there’s 20 or 25. It’s growing very rapidly and I think it’s very exciting that we’re getting on that bandwagon and being first in this immediate area is pretty cool too.”

“It’s definitely a good thing,” former club player Margaret Dickinson said. “To get it out and be a varsity sport now and be able to have volleyball be recognized is really nice. A lot of us enjoy it and have been playing it as a club for a while.”

Aside from the obvious adjustments like official scoring, nicer uniforms and a much longer season, the Dragons will be forced to adjust their schedules.

Phillips, a literacy specialist at Mt. Ararat Middle School, said that, from what she’s heard, the biggest thing lacking in the Brunswick Club Volleyball team was the consistency — practicing and working out every day during the season may be an adjustment for some of the players.

“You come every day, you play every day, you practice. You get better, you make that commitment and have that be a part of your daily life,” Phillips said. “I think that’s going to be the biggest adjustment.”

“I think mostly the teams we’re going to face,” former club player Morgan Johnson said of the biggest difference between club and varsity. “We did have challenges before, last year we only had four games, but this year we’ll have a lot more games against tougher teams. That will be a challenge.”

It all starts the first week of practice. On top of simply learning names and getting to know each other, Tuesday consisted of working on the very basics — serving motion, bumps and passes. In one drill, Phillips had the players toss the ball up like they were serving, only to try and catch it with their eyes closed. In another, the players returned serves to a setter at the net, who simply caught the ball and rotated back in line.

Consistency was the name of the game.

“We’re working on our serving and receiving the serve,” Dickinson said. “Because games are won by those two things. If we don’t do that, we’re not going to get anywhere.”

“Volleyball is a very skill-based sport,” Phillips said. “If you can’t do the skills, it’s pretty difficult to win games. I told the girls yesterday, there are very fun things about volleyball, like hitting and the glory kinds of things, but if you can’t serve and you can’t pass, it’s going to be tough.”

Expectations

After a couple weeks more of practice, Brunswick will face a schedule that might be tough on a battle-tested program, let alone a brand new one.

Short trips over to Mt. Ararat or quick bus rides up Route 1 to Bath won’t be in the cards for the Dragons. They’ll travel an hour down to Wells, 45 minutes up to Cony and 40 minutes to an established program in Scarborough. Phillips said the distance won’t be an issue and that bus rides are great for team bonding, but the games on the court will be a different story.

However, Gardiner (Sept. 2), Wells (Sept. 6), Marshwood (Oct. 7) and York (October 18) are all first-year programs as well — for every game against a developed program like Greely or Falmouth, there’ll be one against a team in the exact same boat as the Dragons.

“I think so far we’ve been working really well together,” former club player Macy Giunti said. “We have a lot of team spirit. Some of us have been here a few years so we already know each other, and the new freshmen seem to be great.”

So, in that respect, Brunswick is prepared.

But even if the squad isn’t prepared volleyball-wise, that’s just fine by Phillips. In her first season at the helm, she won’t be counting wins and losses or setting unrealistic goals.

“Successful to me means the girls are still excited about volleyball throughout the season,” Phillips said. “We don’t have a team, we have a program — we have to think about it like that. The first year is not going to be the telltale of everything. It’s going to be a building year for a few years.”

“We want to compete, we want to win, and we do have high hopes for ourselves, but we do know that we’re a young program,” Dickinson said. “We just want to work our best as a team and see how far we get.”

If there’s one number Phillips has in mind, it’s a personal one.

“I’m most excited because my daughter is in kindergarten and I really want this program to be very, very good by the time she gets here,” she said.

Brunswick opens its inaugural season on Sept. 2 at home against Gardiner.