Adrenaline club volleyball team wins national title

CEDAR RAPIDS — Winning a national championship is never easy.

But a thrilling second-set victory was the turning point for the Hiawatha-based Adrenaline 17 Ben team.

The “Ben” team — named for its coach Ben Bahr — won the USA Volleyball Girls Junior National Championships on July 6 in Las Vegas. The club topped AVC CLE 17 Red, 25-27, 34-32, 15-8, for the championship.

“We knew we had much left to give,” Mount Vernon High School senior Chloe Meester said. “We never entirely gave up in the second set. We kept fighting for every point.

“Then in the third set, we gave it our all.”

Kate Passmore called it “a dream.

“I had tears coming out of my eyes once I knew it was happening,” the 17-year-old senior from Linn-Mar said.

  Buy Photo

Meester was named MVP of the tournament.

“I’m entirely grateful I got MVP, but I still think it’s hard to choose just one person for it,” she said.

Passmore was the reason this team was formed. Last year, she pitched her idea of a new team to club director Marty Smith.

“I wanted to make this dream team,” she said.

Smith agreed and let Passmore pull girls from different teams to form this new team.

“I took a risk, pressed the button and committed,” Passmore said, “Then, everyone else followed after that and it just formed.”

True to her word, the team grew to be a “dream team.”

“We are all super close, even though we know we have to earn the court time for ourselves,” said Sydney Maue, senior at Mount Vernon.

This is Maue’s third year playing for Adrenaline. She also won the national championship in her first year when she was 15.

Kate Shaffer, an Eddyville-Blakesburg-Fremont senior, agreed with Maue.

“The girls make it really easy to want to come. They are really great people,” Shaffer said. This is her first year on the team.

“The friendships I have with everybody on that team is just so strong,” Meester said.

This close bond they share helped them win the championship. According to Maue, they only had about two practices with everyone present in the few months before the tournament.

“That’s the thing, that’s just how our team chemistry is,” she said.

The club, Adrenaline, founded in 2014, aims to “empower youth through the sport of volleyball by striving for greatness on and off of the court.”

These girls are following that mission.

“Working hard and always being a good teammate will get you far. As long as you do that, your skills will follow,” Shaffer said.