Macon Middle School volleyball are conference champs for the third straight year.
Upon taking over the program in spring 2022, head coach Brooke Southard led the team to two stellar years, accruing a 33-1 record and two Blue Ridge Athletic Conference titles. With another perfect season in the conference, the Panthers entered rarified air.
“Our record in the BRAC was 11-0. Overall we were 15-1,” said Southard. “We did lose to Cherokee very early in the season. They were our second game of the season and they had won conference in their division, so Cherokee [is] always really good. They’re hard to beat.”
In guiding Macon to their third straight unbeaten year in the BRAC, winning has become business as usual for Southard, who extended her record overall to 48-2. On the eve of the season however, things became anything but.
“I wish I knew, because there’s been several times – especially this year – I would have to say that I went home feeling that I wasn’t giving my best to the girls,” said Southard of her key to success. “At the beginning of the season, actually right before tryouts, we had a health scare with my father – he was misdiagnosed with cancer. What we were told at the beginning of the season was that he had cancer all over his body, and so right after tryouts I actually flew – my parents went first – and I flew out to MD Anderson for some testing. … Maybe 2 ½ weeks into the season, I was just trying to keep my head above water.”
Thinking her father, Kevin, faced an uphill battle for survival, volleyball switched from a main focus to an afterthought for Southard overnight. But while further scans found Kevin suffers in fact from vasculitis, an autoimmune disease, Southard was soon forced to make an unplanned doctor’s visit of her own.
“Another struggle for the season was I broke my foot the first week of school, so I was in a boot from the first week until the beginning of October,” she said. “That was really hard because I couldn’t move as fast as I could to demonstrate something, so that’s where [assistant coach Amy Tippett] really stepped in and helped me a lot. … It was rough because I’m one who gets very excited, and I could not move. Beating the odds of this year, it was amazing that we came out the way we did because, like I said earlier, I guess my headspace was just so out of it with my foot and my dad and all the things.”
Despite her father’s health scare, her own broken foot and a young, inexperienced team, Southard guided the Panthers to another strong start to the season. When Hurricane Helene struck the mountains however, she was dealt another vexing problem.
“There was about a month that we went without any games,” she said. “We were being optimistic, we were hoping that we would be able to finish, but I was preparing my girls for the worst – that we were possibly done.”
As many of its teams dealt with large-scale damage to their communities, BRAC’s volleyball season was left in limbo for several weeks, amid uncertainty of when its players might return to school. While Macon was thankfully spared from the worst of the devastation, Southard put her players to work in storm relief efforts.
“My husband works for the Forest Service, so he was over there as boots on the ground … he was actually going through door-to-door doing search and rescue,” said Southard. “So, we took the remainder of our concession stand – food, drinks, all the things – we took a practice and we put together goodie bags. I was able to take that over to him, and his base was able to take that out into the field over there in Mars Hill and Yancey County and all them, so they really enjoyed it. … The girls thought it was so cool that that was our concession stand stuff and it was actually going to people. We wrote notes on them – ‘Thinking,’ ‘Praying for you,’ all the things.”
In wrapping care packages for storm victims, Southard killed two birds with one stone, helping fellow North Carolinians in need and keeping her team occupied in the interim. When the season finally resumed, Macon picked up right where they’d left off.
“Obviously all of our conference [east of Sylva] got it pretty bad, so we ordered T-shirts for my girls that had a volleyball with the state of North Carolina and a heart near Appalachia, and we wore those for the remainder of the season. They were really excited about that,” she said. “We finished off with Waynesville and Rugby (Hendersonville) at home, and the girls made goodie bags with a little sticker and volleyball keychain to give to Waynesville and Rugby just saying that ‘We’re thinking and praying for you.’”
After completing their third-straight unbeaten regular season in the BRAC, just two playoff games stood between Macon and a third straight conference title. For the third straight year the team met Rugby in the conference semifinal, where they played their match of the year.
“We had breezed through the first game, but I did get a little worried in the second game because a lot of the time my girls do kind of settle down, and they’re like, ‘Oh, the first set was easy,’” she said. “Rugby ended up getting ahead of us the entire game, and it was 24-22 them. They were fixing to score game point, I decided to call a timeout, and we talked a little bit. We came back on the court and we won that set 26-24, so we won the game in two sets. … I would have to say that was probably the best game my girls have played – one of the top moments in our season.”
After their thrilling win over Rugby Macon advanced to the conference final, where they beat Brevard in an uncontroversial match 2-0. Despite a young team, a midseason hurricane and myriad personal challenges, Southard captured her fourth BRAC title in three years including one with Panther softball last spring. With several players from her first two years already starring for Franklin High School, Southard says Panther volleyball should remain strong for years to come.
“I have a very strong seventh-grade group, and the future looks very, very bright for next year,” she said. “It’s really neat because I had Bristol [Brooks], Finley [Moffitt] and Ella [Raby] just last year and they’re on varsity, so Franklin volleyball is looking bright.”