During the 2024 fall athletics season at Riverside Brookfield High School, the girls volleyball team will welcome a new level of competition: the sophomore team. The addition of a new team was sparked by a move from the Metro Suburban Conference (MSC) to the Upstate Eight Conference (UEC).
Of the 14 schools in the UEC, 12 of them have sophomore teams. This paved the way for varsity head coach, Caitlin Staib-Lipinski, and newly-inaugurated assistant principal of athletics, Fil Torres, to institute it at RB. Having a sophomore team allows more athletes to make the team and get playing time.
“I’ve seen here at RB our numbers increasing, so every year we were cutting a lot of athletes,” Staib-Lipinski said. “If you were a junior and didn’t make varsity, you didn’t play. What’s nice now about having a sophomore team is it allows sophomores to be true sophomores on a sophomore team, and juniors that then don’t get cut get to stay on a competitive team. It opens up more girls to be part of the program.”
The first part of creating a plan to develop a sophomore team was figuring out how beneficial it might be. Since most of the UEC schools had a sophomore team and RB had an adequate number of athletes trying out, Staib-Lipinski decided to meet with Torres.
“I did a lot of research with the new conference,” Staib-Lipinski said. “When I checked the conference and saw that they have five levels, I was like, ‘We at RB for girls have the numbers to get a fifth level, so I’m going to work with our new athletic director [to] see if he’s on board.’ I actually met with him in our preseason meeting, and he was addressing it to me. We walked into the meeting with the same plan, not even realizing we were both going to talk about this.”
After further discussion, the plan to add a sophomore team needed to be approved by the District 208 Board of Education. Staib-Lipinski submitted a proposal backing up the tryout and camp participation numbers. Once all was in order, the coaches began creating schedules for the team. The conference matches were given, but since most teams had set their schedules in the spring, it was difficult to arrange games.
“I got a roster submitted in February,” Staib-Lipinski said. “With teams that have already set everything, you can only have a certain amount of matches. If teams are already booked, then it’s hard to get these sophomore teams programmed. But, I was able to pull two tournaments from JV and give those tournaments to sophomores.”
The final part of setting up the new team for success was finding a coach. Staib-Lipinski reached out to L.J. Hauser Junior High School, where she is also employed, and came in contact with paraprofessional Logan Wiseman about the opening. Wiseman attended college at The Pennsylvania State University and played for their volleyball club.
“It just happened that I was looking for a volleyball coaching job, and all the jobs at Hauser were taken,” Wiseman said. “Staib heard about that and pretty much just snapped me up.”
Now that the sophomore volleyball team is officially in operation at RB, the team has been working hard to get up to speed and is proving to be a force to be reckoned with in the UEC.
“Our goal is the same as my goal for all the teams,” Staib-Lipinski said. “It’s most important to have fun but also establish ourselves. We want to get ourselves on the map. We want people to look at us as a whole program and say, ‘Oh, RB is a really tough program. It’s not a walk in the park for any match. It’s going to be tough to beat them’.”
