Volleyball is one of the most successful sports here at Elder and has shown dominance throughout the year with six state championships and many GCL titles. Coached by Sean Tierney assisted by coach Lubbe, the program never fails to succeed. With the newly renovated gym, the program attracts a large audience containing a variety of ages from grade schoolers to current students, and many supportive alumni. Friday nights in this gym have always been electrifying and will continue to be.

  Though the Panthers are six time state champs, with the latest win being 2016, it has been a heartbreak to say the least these past two years. The 2021 team rallied to overcome St. X in the quarter finals and to advance their way to the finals. Facing the Moeller Crusaders, who shared a similar record heading into this game of 22-3 and Elder’s 24-3. No one was deemed the GCL champs this year due to the league sharing a 3 way tie. So at this point these two teams were truly neck in neck with stats and talent. Though in the end Elder suffered the loss, losing seniors that year like Ben Albers, Drew Wiesman, and Mitch Meyer.

When the 2022 season came around, Elder was the strongest team in the GCL. The team had many experienced players with seniors Joey Bianco, David Mauer, and Drew Maune. This time, the Panthers brought home the GCL while only having one loss in the regular season. It seemed like it was the year for redemption when they met Moeller once again in the state championship. Only the outcome was the mirror of the previous year’s loss with a 3-1 defeat. So many questions filled my head after this. What are we missing? What are we doing wrong? How can we recover from the numerous loss of seniors? How will we bounce back?

I sat down with Senior, Bradley Lanter, to discuss his thoughts for the upcoming 2023 season, and sadly his last. “Our roster has taken quite a hit from losing almost all of our starters,” said Lanter, at what seems to be the main feat to overcome this season. There is no doubt that this team will have to give everything they have. This will no doubt be the hardest work they have ever undertaken. Which brought Brad to follow up with, “I feel like the rest of the GCL is sleeping on us since we are going to be a young team. The boys have already started preparing for this upcoming season by playing club volleyball for Cincinnati Attack.”  He seems pretty confident that his boys are putting in the work this off season. Brad also seems to have a lot of trust with the incoming juniors that the will also be doing as much as they can in the off season. When asked what he thinks Coach Tierney is doing to help his student athletes prepare he said, “Coach Tierney is big into having his players go to strength and conditioning so that we can not only get stronger, but build a good team chemistry too.”

Many people have trust in Coach Tierney, his resume and success speaks for itself. Coach is coming off of winning GCL Coach of the year, and is looking to do it again with this young Elder team. “The loss last year hurts, but we got to keep looking forward and get excited for the potential that our young talented roster is ready to unleash this year.” Brad is very positive about this season and I would not be surprised if you see him as one of the team captains.

Everyone has a job to do this year whether they get much playing time or not. It is going to take all of them to fight their way back up to Columbus. Go and support them this year, because it’s going to take the fans to help us feed off  their energy. Good luck to the volleyball team this year.