By Meghan Foley
Hometown Weekly Staff
Dover-Sherborn High School has a new team this season: this is the first year of the new volleyball team. The group is comprised of 34 girls split into three rotating teams that compete at the JV level.
“I’ve been wanting to—wondering why we never had a team, the whole TVL has a team, except for us, we’re the last team to enter,” recounted Head Coach Chris Fraser. “The cards aligned two springs ago, there was interest [from] a younger group, … we definitely did some volleyball units in elementary school, but, the appetite was always there, it was just someone was just willing to get in that—was willing to take that first step, organizing it, bringing it from a high school club to a JV team.”
Fraser explained that there has previously been a volleyball club at DSHS but not a team:
“It was like any type of afterschool club, it was the volleyball club, for years it was kind of just—play, you show up and you play a little bit, but in order to bring it to the next level, we had to hold practices, and we had a couple scrimmages including Montrose last year. You know, wearing our own t-shirts and shorts and … then we presented it in front of school committee and they approved it to be self-funded for two years, so we’re on the track to hopefully be varsity in 2028.”
“I coached middle school volleyball at Weston for ten years, so this my first year [on this team],” he continued, explaining how he is a Phys. Ed. teacher at Chickering School in Dover. “ I’ve been loving volleyball since I started over at Weston ten years ago, originally I coached boys’ lacrosse, that’s what I played in high school and college, ten years ago I needed a Fall coaching gig, luckily the AD over at Weston, who I was friendly with, Mike McGrath, gave me a shot, I started coaching volleyball, and I fell in love with the game.”
Although the team has already won a few matches, most recently 2–0 over Weston last Friday, a team’s first ever season presents challenges.
“I think we just gotta keep growing,” said Fraser. “We have a lot of new players that the game is—it started off the year as very fast to them on the court, you know, things happen so quickly, but the game’s starting to slow down to them, we have some experienced players like Larissa Do Carmo, Lucía Sáenz, and Yuki Zhou, they all play club, we have some younger players who play club, they’ve been a big help on getting everyone caught up to speed, but it’s just putting what we’ve been practicing all year into play, and you can slowly see as the games go, they’re passing better, they’re hitting better, they’re doing everything, they’re just communicating better, so [the goal is to] just continue to grow in the right direction and keep growing and joy for the game.”
On their strengths, Fraser responded: “The team spirit, the camaraderie between the group is really strong, we’ve got 34 girls total, so you can imagine, practices, [when they’re all together], they get a lot of good work done, but, they seem to be a really tight group, they have a lot of fun, they were loud on the sidelines. … And that’s a credit to our captains who I mentioned earlier, who keep the energy high, and I try to keep the game fun … so we’re really tight as a group, we just need to play for each other, and once we kinda get the more knowledge and get used to the game speed, we’re gonna be pretty good, and at that point the season’ll probably end,” he joked, “but it’s okay, we’ll build into next year.”
Raiders’ schedules can be found online at: arbiterlive.com.
