A look back on 20 years of Marion volleyball

A look back on 20 years of Marion volleyball

Beasley reflects on career thus far

Sports Editor Roughly 21 years ago today, Marion volleyball was far from the household name that it is now.

For starters, the Lady Patriots were exactly one season into their varsity volleyball program, and were participating in a strong conference for that sport in Class 3A.

However, anything worth having is worth working hard for, and that’s a sentiment that Marion head coach Lisa Beasley clearly shares.

Beasley is the only head volleyball coach in the school’s history and remembers the early days as well as her team’s most recent game, a three-set sweep of Greenwood for the 2015 Class 6A state title, Marion’s third since 2010.

Luckily, Beasley’s memory is nearly as sharp as her team’s execution on the court and she was reflective last week as her team gets prepared for the 2016 season.

You gotta start somewhere

As a native of Paragould, Beasley had played volleyball, basketball and ran track during her high school career. She also played softball during her summer break.

After college, Beasley was pursing her master’s degree, when she got a call out of the blue that would change her life.

“My plan was to finish my master’s and then go and try to find a job,” explains Beasley. “I get a call about the job here and my old track coach, Tom Kimbrell, knew Mr. (Dan) Shepherd, who was Marion’s Superintendent at the time and knew that Mr. Shepherd was looking for a volleyball coach.

“I honestly almost didn’t take it because I was already having such a hard time getting my master’s in the first place,” Beasley said with a laugh. “And then the idea of getting to coach a group of kids, and getting to start it (the program) was a pretty neat thing and that was probably the biggest thing for me with that.”

However, there was more to the job than just coaching the high school team.

Beasley coached varsity and junior varsity teams from the high school and junior high, as well as Marion’s 7th-grade teams until the fall of 2004.

That’s an arrangement that made for some long nights for the coach.

In addition to the long game days, Beasley also went through some normal growing pains of a new program upon arriving in Marion.

“So I come in and I walk to the main office and I ask if our gym was aired,” explains Beasley, talking about the Marion middle school gym that is the only home that the Lady Pats have ever known. “They all cracked up laughing because I was covered in sweat. They were also going to give me what they thought were volleyballs, but they were actually soccer balls that they had bought for P.E. and gym class.”

Once Beasley got everything settled in at the gym, she discovered that her preseason sacrifices were worth the hard work.

“I couldn’t have asked for a better group of kids of parents in my first year,” says the coach. “They were there to help with whatever I needed. I remember on our senior night, my senior high team gave me a pendant that said ‘Lady Patriot Volleyball, 1996’ on it and I never took it off until my mom passed away. But I remember going home that night and calling my mom and thanking her for every penny she spent on my education, because that made it all worth it. It really did.”

Marion was a winner in its first game in the history of the program, taking down Blytheville on the road, but the Lady Pats finished just 9-18 overall and 2-8 in the conference in 1996. Their junior high team was 0-12 overall and 0-8 in the league.

“I was so worried that they (the junior high) was going to get discouraged and not want to come back, because that’s a discouraging thing to not win a game,” Beasley recalls.

“We came back the next year and that same group of junior high girls won the conference and finished second in the district tournament and the senior high finished third in the season and the tournament, which would be good, but they only took the top two teams to the state tournament in those days.”

Turning the corner

Entering the 2000 season, Marion had yet to post a winning record at the varsity level, but that all changed in the fall.

The Lady Pats enjoyed a 21-14 record with a 6-4 conference mark during that regular season. That 64 league mark was good for a runner-up finish in the district, as well as a state tournament berth for the first time.

That success continued into the postseason as Marion won the first state tournament game in program history and reached the state semifinals were they faced the host of the tournament, Harrison.

“After our second season, we kept getting better and having more success, I really thought that a lot of good things were coming our way,” says Beasley of her team’s upward trajectory. “2000 we finally get to the state tournament and we played Harrison at their place, and it wouldn’t have been worse if we had played the Razorbacks at Barnhill. I mean, it was crazy. News, radio, TV all over the place. It was insane because it was standing room only, it was loud and we had Jerry Catt and Kathy Horton and some others there with pom-poms and you could see the pom-poms, but it a tough environment.”

Despite the big crowd in Harrison, Marion led all three games at some point against the hosts, but ended up losing in three straight sets. The Lady Goblins would go on to capture the 2000 Class 4A state title, which was their first in school history.

“It was our first year to ever go, it was our first time to play on that platform. I mean, I can make excuses all day long, but I was devastated, the girls were devastated,” recalls Beasley. “I had a friend that helped me back then, she was great, and she was just as upset as I was. But after that, my goal was to stay at Marion until we won a state championship, and I felt like if we kept going the way that we were going then we could do that.”

Beasley’s hunch was a good one as Marion won consecutive conference titles in 2001 and 2002, which were the school’s first.

That string was broken in 2003 when the Lady Pats finished 12-12 overall, which was the last time that Marion finished .500 or below.

2005 was the last season that Marion failed to win 20 games, but still finished 17-5 overall while posting a 12-2 record in the league and made it to the quarterfinal round of the state tournament.

Triumph and tragedy

Entering the 10th season of Marion volleyball, many people around the program must have felt like they were close to a breakthrough, but perhaps nobody expected the ride that they got.

The Lady Pats won its third conference title in 2006 with a 7-1 league mark and finished 21-8 overall.

Marion also finished second in the Conway Invitational, a tournament that hosts some of the premier programs from around the state.

The best was yet to come in the postseason, however. Marion won three state tournament games to reach its first state final to face perennial state power, and league rival, Jonesboro.

“We had some great groups in those years,” says Beasley. “So many great players, but that 2006 group was pretty special.”

Marion and Jonesboro split its two meetings in the league schedule, but the Lady Pats won the conference by virtue of a tiebreaker.

However, it was Jonesboro capturing its 11th state volleyball title that day in Little Rock, slipping past Marion in the maximum five sets to get the gold.

“We got there, we got so close. It hurt because we just couldn’t finish, I guess,” Beasley says. “You start to doubt yourself almost. I know I wondered a lot if there was anything else that I could do? How can we finally get there?”

As much as the loss in the final to Jonesboro bothered Beasley, she suffered through a personal loss off the court that October when her beloved mother died.

“We lost to Jonesboro, absolutely devastating, and Amanda Hitchman comes up and hugs me and I guess it just hit me all of the sudden what had happened in October,” the coach says. “We’re both just sitting there crying and it was awful. It was gutwrenching.”

Beasley’s mother died in October on a Thursday evening, which resulted in the coach missing her first game on the sidelines since the program launched in 1996.

“To be honest, there was a long period there where volleyball was the only thing keeping me going,” she explains. “We had a fun year, I was close to the kids and I knew we had a shot to maybe even win that year… That whole year and that group of kids really kept me from some dark days and were really instrumental because I was really a big-time mama’s girl.”

Marion repeated as league champs in 2007 and returned to the semifinals before finishing second in the conference in 2008 and losing in the state quarterfinals. That 2008 loss to Benton in the final eight is the last time that Marion has not made it to the state semifinals, a run of seven years of a top-four finish in the tournament.

2009 saw Marion post a school record for winning percentage at 29-10 overall and 11-1 in the conference, good for another conference title. The Lady Pats would make its second state title match, before losing to Benton again.

Between 2006 and 2009, Marion won 79 games and lost just 39, captured three conference titles and played in its first two state final games.

As impressive as that run was, the best was yet to come.

Note: This story will be completed in tomorrow’s sports section of The Evening Times.

By Chuck Livingston