As students’ stress increases the desire for human connection grows. Some MCCC students have found their connection in recreational volleyball. What started off as a few friends volleying a ball back and forth eventually turned into a club sport drawing in a large crowd with each game.
Phoebe Fang, former president of the volleyball club and nursing student, and her friend Althea Codilla, former vice-president and fellow nursing student, actually started the club two years ago as a way to express their own love for the sport and de-stress.
Codilla states, “My friend and I actually started the club last year and we just wanted it to be fun, you know, gather people around to make friends and just play volleyball.”
As time went on the club gartered a lot of attention from many students.
Na’Kaii Stembridge, a digital media art major, states, “I saw them playing, just rallying at one point, and then that sounds fun, and then later on we got a net.”
Unfortunately, Fang had to take some time off from Mercer and it became apparent that her absence would leave a massive hole in the future of the volleyball club, leading the club to be suspended for the rest of the year.
After a year of no volleyball, their presence was felt by several students eventually leading a new team of students taking on the roles of leadership within the club. Codilla stepped up to take the mantle as president alongside her friends James Kim, a game design student, and Abraham Mazariegos, a culinary art student, who took on the role of vice-president and treasurer respectively.
“I never really knew about volleyball until recently. It was because I was watching this one anime called Haikyuu!!,” says Kim. “It’s a story about this really, really short kid who fell in love with the sport trying to follow in his idol’s footsteps.”
Kim states, “It really connected with me because I’m not a tall person, I’m 5’7, where like many athletes are like, 6’ plus, so it’s hard to compete.”
Mazariegos says, “I know me personally I’m not really good at volleyball, but I would be 100% down to. I guess, run the back end of things of the club.”
Mazariegos says, “James and Althea could be the front of house and I could be the back of house.”
With the new leadership from Codilla, Kim, and Mazariegos, the club finally began anew, introducing a new wave of students to flock to the quad to play volleyball for hours.
“Volleyball was only restarted this semester,” Kim says. “We just kind of making leeway into getting more people to show up to meetings, we’re trying to get more games, trying to train people, teach them about the game because a lot of people are kind of green to the sport.”
Codilla states, “It has expanded this semester and I’m, like, so glad and so happy because I do want to form a team.”
In the future Codilla, Kim, and Mazariegos hope the club can go on to be more than a sport played on the campus quad.
Kim says, “Hopefully we can actually reach out to other schools, get intramural games, maybe become more official, eventually becoming like an actual team at this school.”
Though their hopes for becoming a club are strong, Kim says there is a little training to be done.
“With a little bit of a nudge from the president and me, I think we can actually inspire them to actually take the sport more seriously. I think they are really up for it because everyday we get new people who want to play,” says Kim.
Mazariegos says, “We all just want to reach out to as many people as possible so that way we can all have fun through the sport of volleyball. If nothing else, we just want to help you de-stress from Mercer and life or just, you know, practice your volleyball skills if you already feel you’re good at volleyball.”
Stembridge says, “It has the power to bring everybody together so that’s what I mostly like about it, that and the spikes.”
