FYN Sports sat down, for an interview, with interim head volleyball Coach Joe Breeden. Coach Jason Stanley is on a leave of absence after the arrival of his two children. While talking with Coach Breeden FYN learned about Fannin County High School’s first volleyball season, and what Coach Breeden expects out of his squad this season.After asking Coach Breeden how FCHS’s first season was, he said

“They ended up 15-14. They actually won a game in the area tournament.”

Coach Breeden explained how volleyball matches forgo region tournaments because it is “broken up into areas.” He went on to say,

“They did really well… They ended up with a winning record.”

After asking what coach wanted to change this season from last season he said

“I just expect them to get a little bit better. They only lost, I think, three girls from last year.”

He commented on Coach Stanley’s leave of absence saying,

“Jason Stanley was the coach last year, and he recently had twins so he had to take a little time off.”

As to the popularity of the new volleyball team Coach Breeden says girls from other sports teams have a lot of interest in joining this season.

Coach Breeden’s outlook for this season is to “improve every game” and have the girls focus more offensively.

When asked about his previous coaching stops, Coach Breeden said there were a lot of similarities in the sports he has already coached in that would ease his transition into coaching volleyball. He added,

“I wanted to try to be an assistant last year; it’s just that I ended up having to coach another sport.”

Coach also said that there were around 20 or so players that are returning for this season.

After interviewing Coach Breeden, I was also able to talk with a few of the holdovers from last year’s team as well.

I asked the players how long they had been anticipating a volleyball team at FCHS an their response was,

“Our Sophomore year, we got the idea from this girl that had just moved here that played volleyball, and she wanted a volleyball team so we jumped on the bandwagon.”

I asked how they thought they could improve on a winning record that was one game over .500. They said,

“Everyone would rather win a whole lot more than we lost. It was decent considering it was our first season. At the end we really became a team and worked together to trust each other and we have a lot of returning players from last year so we should be more experienced.”

I followed up by asking what their outlook for this season is and they said,

“I think we’ll be good, I think we’ll be really, really good. As long as we pick up from where we left off last year, I think we’ll move up and be great. The main thing we struggled with was serving last year and we had a hard time getting over the beginning of the season, the first half of the season, and we improved on that a lot.”