When Teri Leatherwood began working in Carroll Community College’s Office of Student Engagement last year, she kept asking one question: Where was the school’s volleyball team?
Leatherwood had coached volleyball at North Carroll High School and Manchester Valley High School for more than a decade and knew the county had developed a strong women’s volleyball culture. She was convinced there were enough students hungry to take to the court again as part of their community college experience.
“It’s been growing for years, we’ve had more club teams in the last couple of years and the club teams are getting larger,” Leatherwood said. “We just wanted to give them a place to play locally after high school and not necessarily have to go off to the four-year school and pay an inflated cost to attend college.”
Leatherwood’s dream is coming true this fall, as Carroll announced in March it would be adding women’s volleyball as part of its National Junior College Athletic Association Division II athletics program for the 2023 season. She will serve as head coach of the team, which will be the school’s sixth organized women’s sport, joining cross country, track and field, lacrosse, golf and soccer.
Carroll student Taylor Nelson played volleyball under Leatherwood at Manchester Valley and said her former coach pulled her aside in the hallway this spring to personally deliver the news.
“She was like, ‘Taylor, you have to come over here, I’m putting a volleyball team together and I would love for you to try out,'” said Nelson, 20. “I was super excited for that.”
Carroll was one of two community colleges in the state without intercollegiate sports until it launched its athletics program in the fall of 2019 with men’s and women’s cross country and soccer.
“Ever since we’ve been slowly adding a few sports, getting our feet wet,” said Carroll Athletic Director Bill Kelvey. “Basically, we had to start from scratch. We had no athletic infrastructure whatsoever.”
Kelvey has served as a science professor at Carroll since 1993 and helped put together a proposal for an athletics program to present to the college’s board of trustees. Over the years he heard students continually ask about the lack of sports and wanted to afford them the same opportunities he had as a student-athlete wrestling at Texas A&M University.
“[Sports] is almost like a safety net because it’s a continuation of what they had been doing,” Kelvey said. “It keeps them I think a little bit more grounded.”
Maria Acaron, a second-year Carroll student, played varsity volleyball all four years at Century High School, where she won the state championship her junior year. She said she was thrilled to learn Carroll was getting its own team and like Nelson will try out for the inaugural varsity roster in August.
“I’ve been wanting to start playing again for a while, but I couldn’t find anything,” said Acaron, 20. “It’s hard to find stuff when you’re not at a four-year school.”
High school senior Grace Bowman, 18, is homeschooled and has been dual-enrolled at Carroll this spring while playing for the club team FCA Maryland Volleyball. She also hopes to continue playing the sport as she attends Carroll full time this fall and takes general education courses.
“A lot of the time it seems like the only option is to be recruited and go to a well-known university,” Bowman said. “Being able to play here locally at community college really opens a lot of other doors for students.”
Last week, the college announced it had received a Sport Opportunity Grant from the National Junior College Athletic Association Foundation to help jump-start the volleyball team, along with support from more than 20 athletics sponsors. The Carroll Community College Foundation will also help underwrite uniform and equipment expenses.
Leatherwood says offering athletic opportunities ultimately makes for better rounded graduates and provides students an outlet for fun and exercise. She expects to get about 25 students at this year’s tryouts and plans to attend high school and club tournaments throughout the year to raise awareness for the program.
“Team management, leadership, communication. … All of that is what employers want to see,” Leatherwood said. “You gain that by participating in sports, especially at the collegiate level.”
The volleyball team plans to use Coppermine Pantherplex in Hampstead as its home court for the foreseeable future and Nelson says she and other prospective teammates have been using an open gym at the college to train and play coed pickup games in the meantime.
Nelson added that she’s looking forward to the diversity of players the community college team will draw, from dual-enrolled high schoolers to older students with work experience.
“It’s your second family when you have a team, especially playing volleyball,” Nelson said. “Volleyball is all about communication. To have communication on the court and outside of the court is so cool.”
To learn more about the Carroll athletics program, visit carrolllynx.com.