Barton County Community College’s volleyball team has brought in nine freshmen this season for Jaime Cabral’s second year as head coach.
“We are very young,” Cabral said, “so that’ll be the challenge of it. But they are very eager to learn, so that’s good.”
The Cougars are not the only junior college in the Kansas Jayhawk Community College Conference with a large freshman class this year.
“We had our Butler scrimmage this past weekend and I noticed that with other teams, a lot of freshmen around the conference,” Cabral said. “It’ll be a very interesting year in the conference, just because of how freshmen-heavy everyone seems to be.”
At the Butler scrimmage, the Cougars finished with a 4-0 record after playing Allen County, Independence, Kansas City Kansas and Labette. Each of their opponents were NJCAA Division II, Cabral said.
For a majority of the team, it was the first time they had been on the floor for a college game, giving the team some much needed experience.
On Friday, the Cougars will be hosting a tournament on campus to start off the season. They play Northern Oklahoma-Enid first on Friday at 3 p.m. Then at 7 p.m., Barton plays Seminole State, which is ranked 15th in the country. On Saturday, the Cougars play two more matches. The first will be against Cisco at 2 p.m. The second will close out the tournament at 6 p.m. against Hesston.
At Butler, Cabral was able to find some things that the team needed to work on. The most important thing the coach saw was a need to stress making first contact with the ball.
“Something we stress a lot of our passing or on defense, getting that first dig after someone hits,” Cabral said. “Our first contact is something we stress huge in this game just because without that first contact, nothing else will follow.”
The team returns only two players from last season. Raney Okeson, from Weskan, started last year as an outside hitter and is expected to be a big help for the team’s offense.
“She’s going to play a very huge role with her experience level,” Cabral said. “She’s got the most experience playing in our conference on our team.”
Morgan Cooper, the only other sophomore on the team, will play on as the Cougars’ libero, the defensive specialist.
The rest of Barton’s volleyball team is made up of freshmen. Among the freshmen, the team’s setter, Juliana Melo de Barro is standing out.
“Our setter, by far, is standing out a ton,” Cabral said. “She has a lot of experience, playing for a club in Brazil and she is just so smart with the ball.”
“She sees the floor and understands the game very well. She has great distribution.  She just doesn’t set one person all the time.”
Another standout from the freshmen class is Malia Tonga, an outside hitter from Hawaii.
“She is hitting very well from the outside,” Cabral said. “She is a very strong player, and plays with a lot of emotion out on the floor.”
In Cabral’s first year as head coach, the Cougars finished 22-12 overall and finished fourth in the conference. Entering the conference tournament at the end of the year as a fourth seed, the Cougars beat the top-seeded Seward to knock them out of the tournament on their way to finishing in third place.
With the new team, Cabral said he thinks that their willingness to work gives them a shot at competing in the conference.
“We are very different, this year’s team, we are much more athletic, this year than we were last year,” Cabral said. “The volleyball sense, the volleyball smarts is slowly coming with this group.”