The SAU men’s volleyball team hit the court this season with plenty of heart, but not much experience. They started the season with a roster full of first-year players and few returners. This led to the Bees facing an up-hill climb from the start, but saw much improvement.

Head coach, Ray Green, says, “so we had, gosh, almost half of the team was first years, freshman, or we had one that had switched over from football to volleyball and I think when you have half your team as new, there’s the learning struggle, there’s a learning curve. Them getting used to the speed, getting used to having to go to classes, having to travel, having to take time out to eat, rest, and recover, things like that are a little bit different then high school.”

The returning players had to adapt to a younger team. One returning player, Anthony Anderson says, “coming in as a junior, compared last year to this year, we really did have the team chemistry. As we had in the past years I have been here, but this year was really different between the chemistry between our freshman and upperclassmen, it especially helped because the freshmen were such a big group, you know they are able to grow.”

Growing is what the Bees did, setting their season up with minimal expectations. SAU freshman Pedro Zang says, “I believe that since we had a big class of freshmen on our roster this year we didn’t have many expectations of how the season should look like, it’s our first time on a collegiate level of volleyball and we just played like everything was new because to us it was. We didn’t expect what we should do or what we shouldn’t do so we were expecting just to do the best in our capacity.”

Anthony says their home opener set their pace for the season. He says, “there’s a lot of moments, we are a fun team, a fun group to hang out with but you know if I had to pick… that season opener for us, there were so many fans and a big crowd, it was crazy that night. You can really feel the energy, the love from everyone at Ambrose. Everyone working together, you know it just- it was amazing.”

The team finished with 14 wins overall this season, after just 8 wins in 2024. Hopefully setting up future success. Coach Ray is ready to keep working. He says, “we’re gonna keep building and that’s been our key word I guess all season is build, build, build. We take time outs and say let’s build on this lead or let’s build to catch up, but just building so we’ve got some really good recruits coming in. We only graduate one, so we are very excited that the core is returning and we are just gonna keep adding to it. so building is what i’m looking forward to.”