Girls club volleyball: Tawa’s Daffy Day at Triple Crown NIT in Kansas City

All photos by John Tawa

KANSAS CITY, Missouri — Ronald Reagan once said, “If it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then it probably is a duck.”

Saturday at the Triple Crown NIT in Kansas City, players served, players set, players hit and players dug.

It was all kind of ducky.

I’ve been covering girls volleyball nationally for 20+ years, but I hadn’t been to a big convention center tournament before the pandemic.

I quickly learned that Day 1 at Triple Crown is unlike anything I’ve seen before. The talent is, quite simply, overwhelming. I recognized the play on the courts as volleyball. It hadn’t been that long. But it was next-level volleyball, with the players, taller, faster, stronger and more powerful than I recalled. It was inspiring!

My favorite player on this day was long middle Ayden Ames of TAV 16 Black. She played with intensity and was always up in transition. Ames, who played at Mizuno Long Beach a year ago, led TAV over defending age group national champion Dynasty 16 Black for its lone win of the day. The win snapped a seven-game losing streak to the Kansas City squad.

My next favorite player was probably Mari Singletary, another long-armed middle. The Texas signee led dynamic A5 Mizuno 18-Marc to a 3-0 day. That team is fun to watch!

All in all it was a fun day in the gym, as the photos interspersed throughout this piece will demonstrate. It wasn’t a full experience, though, until I got clocked in the head by an errant warmup ball.

Turns out I’d forgotten to duck.

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John Tawa