Club Princeton
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| Princeton High School junior Jolyn Kane makes the next pass during warm-ups Wednesday for the Princeton Tiger Volleyball Club at Logan Junior High School under the eye of coach Demi Salazar. The team practices once a week and plays a tournament once a month in a low-key atmosphere. (BCR photo/Kevin Hieronymus) |
PRINCETON — For a guy who supposedly retired from coaching volleyball in 2008, former Hall and Putnam County High School coach Demi Salazar seems like he forgot to hang up his whistle.
Last fall, Salazar pitched in to help the volleyball program at Henry High School, where he serves as the district’s computer tech.
His latest adventure is the brand new Princeton Tigers Volleyball Club team, which he has helped organize with an 18-and-under team in its first season.
“Annette keeps saying I misunderstood what it meant when you say you retire,” Salazar said of his wife.
He doesn’t know the word apparently.
Salazar hatched the idea for the Princeton club during a conversation with his volleyball friends, Dan and Sylvie Tracy of Princeton. When he heard Sylvie, a senior player for PHS last fall, saying she wasn’t planning on playing any club because of the time commitment, Salazar came up with a twist to the frantic schedule club volleyball typically brings.
“I told her, ‘What if we just got a team together that would meet once a week?” he said.
Low costs
Salazar, who helped start up the Illinois Valley Volleyball Power Club in the early ‘90s, figured there were other girls interested in continuing volleyball, but due to costs, time and other restraints were not coming out. There was no intent to take away from any other club, he said, but just to make something available to give the Princeton kids another avenue.
“We were saying it’d be neat if we could keep the kids in some form of volleyball and tournaments would be extra. The only way we could do it was form a club,” he said. “We told them, ‘We want you out and we’ll make it cheap as possible. The people from Princeton don’t have far to drive and it’s about half of normal club fees, so it’s pretty cool.
“The kids seem to like it. Sometimes kids don’t necessarily like it, but they’re getting better. They’re actually liking it and getting better.”
The team practices Wednesday evenings at Logan Junior High and will play once a month, five tournaments overall, all one-day events rather than the typical all-weekend of most club activities. Salazar said the practices, when incorporates the use of his sixth-grade son, Isaac as a target, are more important than the games.
“We’re just focusing on learning,” he said. “We run a lot of different formations. We just practice. We don’t have to worry about winning games.”
The Princeton Club consists primarily of hometown talents like freshmen Katherine Pranka and Michaela May, sophomores Gabby Smith, Laura Fredenhagen, Jessica Martell, juniors Allie Youngren and Jolyn Kane and seniors Jacquie Kane, who will play at Lincoln College next fall, and Tracy.
Hall senior Mickey Victor, who is planning on playing for North Central College next year, has joined the mix, and Salazar has brought three girls in from Henry with him — juniors Lauren Schrowang and Abby Steele and freshman Kimber Schrowang.
18-and-under
Princeton is playing in the 18-and-under division, though half of its team is 16-and-under. Ideally, Salazar would like to have the club solely for kids coming back to high school, but “this year we needed some seniors. We have a lot of kids who never played club and we got three great (seniors).”
Salazar would like to add a 16-and-under team next season.
In its first taste of competition at the College of DuPage Jan. 16, Princeton was overwhelmed in its first game against a team from Indiana, Salazar said. By the third game, they scored 21 points.
“I was really happy by the fact you got F/S competing against a team they said made the Elite Eight. So we learned a lot,” Salazar said. “We achieved the objective going up there, seeing somebody other than ourselves and learning from it.”
In training so many Princeton kids, Salazar, a Princeton resident, laughed when asked if he was on PHS coach Andy Puck’s payroll now.
“Yeah, probably,” he said. “We really hope we help him and the girls from Henry. They’re finding when you have 7-10 kids who are totally dedicated to it, you can get so much more done.”
Even though he’s taken on the Princeton team name, the former Hall coach said he hasn’t necessarily taken on the Princeton colors just yet.
“I had hard time getting a Princeton jacket on me. It wasn’t fitting on me. It was like holy water on the devil,” he said.
Make that the Red Devil.
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