1994 Girls Volleyballers Meld into NCS Champs
1994 CVHS Girls’ Volleyball Champions:
Bottom row, left to right, are Meghan Sutcliffe, Leslie Welch, Shauna Welch and Brandi Walls. Top row: Coach Eric Boice, Judi Behnken, Jill Schmitz, Alyssa Carbonetti, Amy Kohl, Heather Sammons, (the smile of) Barbara Klews, Sara Szalay, Gigi Townsend, and Nicole Abella.
The 1994 Castro Valley High Girls Volleyball team had some big sneakers to fill.
The tremendously talented 1993 team went 28-4 and won the North Coast Section Division II championship. Trouble was, there were 10 seniors on that team who had graduated. The ’94 team had just four seniors who had played the year before.
As if that wasn’t enough, the 1994 Trojans had a new coach, Eric Boice, who had been the junior varsity coach under the very successful Glen Mitchell. Boice had to meld the new girls on the team with the veterans. It wasn’t always easy.
“The age difference created a chemistry unbalance,” Boice recalled 29 years later. “It was a tough nut to crack.”
But crack it he did. The 1994 team equaled the ’93 team’s record of 28-4 and repeated themselves as the NCS Division II champion. For its accomplishment, the 1994 team has been elected to the 2024 Castro Valley Sports Hall of Fame.
“The win was sweeter for me the second year because we had to work so hard becoming a unit,” said Alyssa (Carbonetti) Bellevue, the senior setter and co-captain of that team. “It was different personalities coming together.”
Senior Heather (Sammons) Miller, the league Most Valuable Player, was joined on the front line by two talented sophomores, Amy Kohl and Barbara Klews. Alyssa knew exactly how to set up Heather for big hits; they had been playing together for years on club teams as well as in high school. But Amy and Barbara were new to her.
“Setting up each hitter is a little different,” Alyssa explained. She had to learn how to feed the ball to the new girls. “Every game we were getting used to each other.”
“Eric kept telling us we were only as strong as our weakest link,” Heather recalled. That meant the team had to come together as a unit and that’s exactly what happened.
The season culminated with a five-set victory over Ukiah in the NCS finals, a thriller that saw the Trojans come back from a two-set deficit. Alyssa described what happened after the second set.
“It was the apex of my frustration,” she said. “I was just making dumb mistakes. Eric pulled me aside and told me to get that frustrated look off my face and get out there and win this game. He kind of reamed me out.”
With a mind reset, the Trojans came out and won the next three sets, each one a nail biter. It may not have been as easy as the year before but, to the seniors, it was more satisfying.
“We won that year on the shoulders of the work put in by many girls who came before us,” Alyssa said. “It can’t be overstated how important the girls before us were to our success. They set the tone and laid the foundation.”
“The ’93 team was our inspiration, just as Glen was an inspiration for me,” Boice recalled. “No one expected us to win it all in 1994. It was a surprise.”
The unity created on that 1994 team has lasted for three decades. Many of the women on that team have remained close, sharing many of life’s milestones such as marriages and family deaths. “So much of life is about relationships,” Heather Miller reflected. “That’s what we learned.”
In addition to those already mentioned, the 1994 team consisted of Brandi Walls, Gigi Townsend, Nicole Abella, Judi Behnken, Meghan Sutliffe, Leslie Welch, Shauna Welch, Sara Szalay and Jill Schmitz. Boice’s assistant coaches were John Hierro, Tom Sammons, Dean Sutcliffe, Eric Jacobson, and Jeff Mar. Marilyn Bowman served as team coordinator.
This is the first in a series of 16 articles profiling the 2024 inductees into the Castro Valley Sports Hall of Fame.