Franklin’s newest athletic team is back in action.
Following their inaugural season last spring, Panther men’s volleyball has been hard at work again, playing the first matches of their 2025 campaign. In the country’s fastest-growing high school men’s sport, Franklin has had no shortage of talent.
“[We’ve had] very good turnout,” said Panther volleyball czar Bekah Brooks, who also coaches the school’s varsity girls team in the fall. “Even from the beginning last year we had a ton come to the meetings and the first couple of practices, and it kind of dribbled down, but this year has been consistent with who showed up at the meeting and who has come. … We kind of put in some rules about not missing practice, and we’re only practicing twice a week, so we need them there. So, unless it’s for another sport or whatever – and I know sometimes work gets in the way – they’ve been super-consistent with that.”
With a successful 2024, including a 4-3 regular season and a trip to the state playoffs, the team was able to skip the growing pains that typically follow new programs. In just their first two matches of 2025, the team has already experienced a wide range of competition.
“Just the joy of going and winning that first game at East [Henderson] was good for their minds, and knowing that we are doing some things right,” said Brooks of Franklin’s 3-1 win over the Eagles March 13. “Last night we saw a lot more speed and some things that we can work on, and we can go back and say, ‘Hey, look at this.’ We have the film and they can go back and watch that – it’s just instilling in them the things that girls have which is that intuition, like, ‘This is what I’ve got to do.’”
Facing T.C Roberson in their first home match March 19, the Panthers fell 3-0 to one of WNC’s best teams. Despite the result however, Brooks said she was proud of her team’s efforts.
“They’re probably one of the best teams in the western region [along with] Watauga – that area is pretty good because they’ve been playing for a lot longer,” said Brooks. “Coach John [Wagaman] over there from T.C. has done a really good job of creating that program, and of course they have 700 more kids to choose from than we do. Our baseball, our track, all that is super-good in the fact that we have to share so many athletes, and there was not supposed to be a track meet yesterday and the track meet got moved, so I lost five of my athletes to the track meet. Usually we have 18 on the roster and we didn’t have five of those, and all five would play.”
“But, with the ones we had I thought we competed very well. That team was good – the boys said, ‘We played really good tonight; we just played the Avengers.’ They can hit, they can jump, but we did so many good things like blocking, setting up a block, and figuring out the defense off of those great hitters. … The JVs almost came back and won their second set, and of course none of those boys have ever played before, so I was just really proud of them.”
Between sharing athletes with other spring sports and coaching inexperienced players, Brooks and assistant Cindy Harrell have undertaken a challenging task, essentially working for free without the usual supplements paid to coaches of official varsity sports. With fast-paced action and high-flying athleticism, the historically female-led game has made major inroads with men.
“We have quite a few freshmen, which is really cool. Some of them have a language barrier, so we’re coaching a few Hispanics that speak little to no English, and they’re learning the best they can with what they see [and] by their friends helping them,” said Brooks. “We have a kid on our team that spent a lot of his childhood in the hospital and he can’t play any contact sport, so he can’t play football or basketball. He can swim and play volleyball because there’s no contact, and he was so excited to be able to play a sport at the high school and be part of a team, so I’m so glad we had that to offer for him. Some of the boys knew nothing about volleyball – they were like, ‘Let’s just see if this is fun,’ and they came out, and it was fun to see their parents in the stands last night.”
Amid men’s volleyball’s rapid nationwide growth of recent years, Franklin has joined an accelerating groundswell across the state. Since its founding in 2016 by Charlotte-area coach Sarah Conklin, the N.C. Boys Volleyball Association has expanded exponentially, from just seven teams statewide in 2022 to nearly 100 last year. This spring the NCBVA fell just two schools shy of the 110 needed for an official sanctioning vote from the N.C. High School Athletic Association, which must be sustained over two years. With just 12 schools listed in the NCBVA’s Western region (including Franklin’s Mountain Seven Conference rivals Pisgah, East, North and West Henderson), Brooks said she’s been doing her part to grow the sport across the mountains.
“Pisgah is the closest one that has a team, and they just have a varsity team,” she said. “West is new this year into the program, North has been doing it for two or three years, and of course T.C. as well. Hendersonville is another one that has been doing it a couple of years, and then Enka is another one that has a really good program. That’s where we go on Monday, so those are the closest ones in our area. … I’m going to try my best this year to kind of talk more in our conference. I couldn’t talk to Smoky because they lost their girls coach and that’s where I would start, but [for] Smoky and Tuscola, it only really takes one team in the beginning – just enough to have a team, play five or six games and get used to it.”