Team faces challenge, wins championship

When volleyball coach Wade Benson first took a look at his U-18 Splash squad, he saw a challenge.

“We’re a very young team,” he said. “We only have three 18-year-olds on the team. We have a bunch of 17-year-olds and a couple who are just 16.”

With a go-to player that’s just 16 years old, the Splash rolled into Disney World in Orlando, Fla., earlier this month and kept right on rolling. The team did not lose a match in four days of competition, winning the AAU National Championship, knocking off Puerto Rico in the final match, 23-25, 25-21, 15-10.

The team heads to Minneapolis next week in search of a Junior Olympics gold medal.

“This isn’t the kind of team where you would look at it on paper and think ‘Wow,’ ” said Benson, who’s the volleyball coach at Eastern Washington University when he’s not leading the Splash. “We’ve had those kinds of teams here in the past – teams loaded with Division I college prospects. This team, though, just finds a way to win. They’re winners.”

Still, the Splash has a youthful pedigree – with multiple players off repeat state champion Mead, a couple from state runner-up Lewis and Clark and a couple more from three-time state Class 1A champion Colfax.

“Most of these kids come from very successful programs,” Benson said. “A lot of them came in and they were used to playing a lot. But they accepted their roles,0 and they just kept getting better at them.”

Lauren Mellor, who just graduated from Colfax after helping the Bulldogs win three consecutive state Class 1A volleyball titles and four straight basketball championships, is headed off to play at Auburn in the fall. Her sister, Lizzie, played for Benson at Eastern Washington.

Kristen Tellin, the team captain for Central Valley, signed a national letter of intent to play for the Fighting Saints of Carroll College.

Tabitha Mabry, from Lake City High in Coeur d’Alene, is headed to the University of Nevada-Las Vegas.

But the three standouts from the AAU national championship tournament all will be playing for area high schools – and two of them were sophomores last year.

Chloe Rowand, who helped lead Lewis and Clark to the state championship match as a sophomore last year, and Meg Ryan, who helped Mead knock off the Tigers in the title match as a junior, both earned All-America honors in Florida. Oceana Bush, Rowand’s sophomore teammate at LC, was named the tournament’s Most Valuable Player.

Benson said his players will find themselves on Division I college radar.

“If a coach is just looking at numbers, they may not spend a lot of time looking at these kids,” he said. “But the one thing that will stick out on these kids’ resume now will be one word: winner. These are the kinds of kids you want coming into your program. They work hard and they improve.

“And yes, they make the people around them better.”

Other players on the team include: Amanda Dahlstrom, a 5-foot-7 defensive specialist/outside hitter who will be a senior at Mead this year; Kelsey Allen, a 5-foot-8 setter who will be a senior at Ferris; Samantha Christensen, a 5-foot-7 defensive specialist as a senior for Mead; Carly Dorshorst, a 5-foot-7 outside hitter and senior at Medical Lake; Abby Bruya, a 5-foot-6 setter who will lead Colfax in quest of a fourth-straight state volleyball title as a senior; and Hanna Jansen, a 5-foot-10 setter who returns to Freeman for her senior season.

Carianna Rath, a 5-foot-7 outside hitter/defensive specialist who also will be a senior at Ferris, did not make the AAU tournament trip, but will rejoin the team for the Junior Olympics.

The coaching staff is pedigreed as well. Benson’s assistant coach is Steve Rupe, who doubles as the women’s volleyball coach at Whitworth. When Rupe was unable to make the Florida trip, North Idaho College’s Chris Costy, a former AVP player who played his college volleyball for the University of Hawaii, stepped in.

The Splash was designed to allow area volleyball talent to test itself on a national stage, the coach said.

“Pat and Patty Murphy started this club before I ever got here, and I’ve been part of it now for 10 years,” he said. “When I got here, I came from the Portland area where they have a lot of clubs like this that are designed to test yourself against the best teams in the country, not just the best teams in your town or in your region. That’s what we based the concept on when I got here, to try to stretch ourselves and test ourselves and see where we’re at against the best teams in the country.

“We’ve always gone out and done at least three or four tournaments that feature the best teams in the country. We’ve done pretty well.”

Despite the fact that the team entered the AAU tournament as a No. 1 seed, Benson said the team has only recently come into its own.

“We’re just coming together here of late,” he said. “We’ve found a go-to-player in Oceana Bush. She’s one of those kids who you can throw the ball up to in an emergency and most of the time something really good is going to happen. We probably have the next-best-thing to that in another junior from the same team in Chloe Rowand. She’s one of those Bambis-in-the-rough who just gets better and better every time out and is going to be a definite Division I prospect.

“Then we have a bunch of kids who are just really, really good role players who have gotten really good at it. As a group, they’re just hard to beat.”