Saint Michael’s volleyball: Growing a sport while growing a program

Jeanne Nauheimer Dorf ’09

As the Saint Michael’s College Women’s Volleyball program works at growing and achieving wider recognition, coaches and team members say they also feel a special responsibility to grow the sport in the Burlington-area community and throughout Vermont and beyond.

Jeanne Nauheimer Dorf ’09, the College’s head women’s volleyball coach, feels that Saint Michael’s women’s volleyball has an opportunity to inspire the next generation of young female athletes and introduce them to a new sport that has not caught on yet in Vermont as much as in other parts of the country.  She feels a responsibility to help promote greater parity in high school volleyball throughout Vermont, a state that presently sees two well-resourced programs dominate competition year after year.

Some possible approaches she proposes for getting the good word out about volleyball might be hosting Vermont college and high school tournaments and holding clinics for high school coaches and athletes, or inviting high school referees to college practices in order to help them learn a higher level of the game. In general, the Saint Michael’s volleyball program leaders want to have more schools, bigger numbers, and increased community involvement at both the college and high school levels in the state, the coach said.

With the first-ever Vermont Principals’ Association (VPA) sanctioned State Championship tournament occurring only six years prior in 2016, women’s volleyball is still one of Vermont’s newest sports, in stark contrast to almost every other state throughout the nation where the sport enjoys far greater popularity.

“There are so many areas [around the country] where that’s just what your family did. If you look at Wisconsin or Nebraska or Minnesota, they pack in to watch those [volleyball] games,” Nauheimer Dorf said. “In contrast, very few youth would come to our games when I was a player at St. Mike’s — within the community we were just ‘that group who played volleyball.’”

A lot has changed, however, since the coach’s playing days as a St. Mike’ student majoring in English and only a handful of schools had teams. In the fall of 2021, however, Vermont high schools statewide had 17 varsity volleyball teams. Yet despite this rapid growth, the sport faces issues of parity that ultimately hinder its evolution. During these six years, the same two teams have played in every championship game: Champlain Valley Union High School and Essex High School, chiefly because of the resources and access to the sport in those communities.

“When you’re looking at schools like CVU or Essex, they have so many resources and are also in relatively affluent communities versus a school like Winooski, which is literally right down the street but doesn’t have a volleyball program,” said Nauheimer Dorf, who coached at CVU. “We want to make sure that we are giving pathways to activity, to team building, to camaraderie, to all of the really good things that happen when you’re part of a team.”

As the coach puts it, “I want more people to be excited about it, and by coming here and getting to develop a program like St. Mike’s with as many barriers as we face, it’s a fine opportunity to show more people the passion and the fun that we have when we play the sport. Every time we get to invite youth to our games and they get to see what volleyball can look like, it is just another way of growing the sport.”

“I think that St. Mike’s in its mission of service and education can make a difference in these areas to make volleyball more than just a fun thing to do on a Tuesday night,” she said. “This could be the first exposure to something of this kind for a kid.”

“You see different heights and shapes in volleyball than you do in other sports,” Nauheimer Dorf said. “I think it’s really helpful for young women to realize that if they’re built a certain way they still have opportunities to engage in athletics and to play a sport and have a team and belong to that team in a way that not every other sport does.”

Syrah Wright ’25 during recent game action.

During the fall 2021 season, Saint Michael’s Women’s Volleyball experienced two historic firsts as Vermonters Syrah Wright ‘25, an exploratory major from Richmond, and English major Beth Syverson ‘23 of Huntington (both graduates of nearby Mount Mansfield High School) joined the roster, Syverson as a transfer from Emmanuel in Massachusetts.

Of her trailblazing status for the program as one of the few Vermonters to join the team through its history, Wright ‘25 said, “I think I can be an inspiration to younger players in the state because they’re able to see that a little Vermonter from a small high school can do big things. It’s a beautiful thing to have others look up to you whether they play my position or not. I definitely feel as though I have extra responsibility in developing the sport, but not in a stressful way.”

*Note: The author of this story, Elizabeth Syverson, is a member of the women’s volleyball team.