Central Valley volleyball coach Laurie Quigley returns as a winner

Laurie Quigley thought for a moment, remembering back to when she last played volleyball in the Greater Spokane League.

“It’s been longer than most people seem to think,” she said, smiling. “It’s been eight seasons.”

Quigley played high school volleyball at Lewis and Clark for her mother, Julie Yearout, before going on to play collegiately at Western Washington. Tuesday she returned to the GSL as the head coach at Central Valley and won her debut, sweeping aside Rogers 25-15, 25-10, 25-4.

The GSL has changed since her playing days, Quigley said.

“I think there’s just one coach left from when I was a player,” she said. “That’s going to make things fun.”

Quigley’s mother now is the coach at West Valley.

The Bears squad Quigley inherited features 10 seniors.

“We’re still working to fill some holes left by last year’s seniors,” the coach said. “This group just loves to play volleyball together. They have a lot of fun together and they work hard together.

“We’ve been working them hard. We’re not going as long as some teams, but we’re getting our work done.”

Quigley said she kept the assistant coaches from the group Amanda Bailey put together during her two seasons at CV, including her assistant coach, Mark Weis, the former head coach at University.

“I think it’s important to have some continuity,” she explained. “Any time you have a new coach come in, or have new players come into a new program, it’s going to take a while to get used to the new system.”

Any season-opening jitters disappeared quickly, for both players and coach. And once CV grabbed the game’s momentum, it kept it and fed it joyfully.

By the third game, CV was a steamroller, charging to a 16-0 lead before closing the match with a 25-4 win.

Keann White finished with nine kills, and the CV hitters consistently found open spaces. Jade Rockwood fired a half-dozen aces at the Pirates and dished out 25 assists as she ran the offense efficiently.

Most impressively, the Bears maintained their intensity while having an extraordinary amount of fun. Central Valley is one of those rarities in varsity sport: a collection of laughing, happy warriors.

When this group puts on its game face, it invariably has a big, toothy grin.

“They’ve been like that from the beginning,” the coach said. “They have a lot of fun playing together.”

 One of the biggest changes in the GSL since Quigley last played is in the amount of club experience players have throughout the league.

“When I played, everyone played club volleyball, but we stopped playing in May and had the summer to relax and get ready to play school volleyball,” she said. “Now everyone is playing well into June and July.

“We really didn’t want to work them that hard in our summer workouts because they were already getting a lot of work in with their club teams. Mostly, we just wanted them to be with each other and get ready for school volleyball.”

Quigley said the challenge for the season opener was to get the team over a set of jitters.

“The team was much more nervous about playing this match than for any of their club matches,” she said. “When you play club volleyball, you’re never playing in front of much of a crowd. It’s nothing like the kind of crowd that comes out to support them when they play for their school.”