In the spring of 2023, the men’s volleyball club made its debut at Green Hope, where members would occasionally gather to play on nearby sand courts. Flash forward to the spring of 2024, the club evolved into competing with different schools across the state. On March 1, the Green Hope men’s volleyball team played their first game against Heritage High School, taking home the victory with a score of 2-0.
Coming into a new season, the club previously had hosted various events on sand volleyball courts, however; the club didn’t consist of matches with other schools, rather having five teams with eight players on each team, all from Green Hope, to play against each other.
As for the 2023-2024 school year, the club evolved into having both varsity and JV teams, also being able to play against other schools. The teams moved away from sand volleyball courts into school gymnasium courts and the Triangle Volleyball Club center for their matches.
Player Changbo Lu (‘25) expressed the growth of the team, “Last year, we started off by not playing volleyball hardly at all, and now we’ve gotten a lot more opportunities for us to play together as a team,” he said.
As the season progressed from the beginning of March to late April, the varsity team’s record currently stands at 6-9, while the JV team’s record sits at 5-0.
For Lu, the games themselves weren’t the highlights of the season, as winning didn’t matter as much to him. Instead, he describes his experience during the games as being about the dynamic among each of the other players in both the varsity and JV teams. “Last year, men’s volleyball was just a club that we would do for fun during the summer on outdoor sand courts. This year for the first time, we were able to play as a team against other schools, which was a really cool experience.”
As for Mithu Raghu (‘26), he emphasizes how much each player on the team had gotten a chance to improve throughout the season. “They’ve all been constantly improving really fast over the course of the season and we are able to officially compete with teams that have been playing for a long time now, whereas this year is really our first ever season playing like this.”
The Green Hope men’s volleyball team capped off their season by playing their final match against Apex Friendship on April 26. The JV team kept their undefeated streak, while the Varsity team lost their last game.
