SMCVT.edu: Women’s Volleyball Promotes Growth of Fledgling Sport in Vermont

This story originally appeared on SMCVT.edu. Also view a PDF on SMCAthletics.com here.

By Beth Syverson ’23

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’s student majoring in English, when 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…