CALEDONIA — Tori Brooks knew this year’s Caledonia volleyball team was something special when it was on the brink.
On Aug. 22, Brooks, a senior captain for the Confederates, watched her team drop two tight sets at home to Starkville. Just 10 days prior, Starkville hosted Caledonia and won a five-set thriller by virtue of taking a 26-24 heartbreaker of a fourth set.
Brooks and her teammates weren’t prepared to accept a second loss to Starkville in as many weeks. The Confederates’ roster features seven seniors with plenty of experience playing together, and the whole team has plenty of positional versatility.
“If somebody’s having a bad game, you can take them out and put somebody else in that has been playing somewhere else,” Brooks said.
That’s exactly what coach Samantha Brooks — Tori’s mother — did. It worked immediately. The third set went to Caledonia, 25-18. Same with the fourth set, 25-22. Then the fifth at 15-12.
“We all worked together,” Tori Brooks said. “We jelled really good.”
That chemistry and success might be what you’d expect from a team with players who’ve shared a court since fifth grade — but maybe not from a 4A school like Caledonia.
Caledonia has had a number of 5A and 6A programs on the schedule already, and there’s more where that came from. But captains Tori Brooks and Ansley Brown don’t seem to mind.
“It’s competitive, and if you win, it’s a big thing,” Brooks said.
The Confederates certainly had a “big thing” just two days before their dramatic comeback against Starkville. They took a two-set lead in a home match against Tupelo, watched the Golden Wave recoup and then won the fifth set to seal a critical win.
For Brown, playing big schools like Starkville and Tupelo is simply fun. “Especially if you go into it like, ‘Oh, this might be a hard game, but it will be a good game,'” Brown said.
The Confederates haven’t just survived those good, tough games — they’ve thrived.
They beat Class 5A Lafayette in the Pontotoc Classic in Oxford in mid-August, and they beat the Commodores again in a true road match at Lafayette — all without dropping a single set. Four of Caledonia’s six wins entering Tuesday are against schools in a higher class.
“We’re little Caledonia out here, but we’ve got a really good volleyball team,” coach Brooks said. “A really good program.”
And the Confederates’ success is nothing new, either. Caledonia swept its Class II, Region 4 matches last year, winning all eight before losing to Lewisburg in the first round of the district playoffs.
The team’s seven seniors have more than just playoff experience. They have the chemistry from years of school teams and club matches — Tori Brooks, Brown, setter Camryn Johnson and middle hitter Kennedy Lambert have played for the same team in the Level Elite club, based in Columbus.
“It does help a lot when we practice in the offseason,” Brown said. “We see different coaches, so we learn stuff from coach Brooks in our season, but we go and we have other outlooks on it, too, from our club, and we all see the same stuff.”
Equipped with experience and fueled by familiarity, the ‘Feds have even put their summertime to use in preparing to take the next step. They practiced for two and a half hours three days a week during the summer — conditioning, practicing and scrimmaging.
“They want it,” coach Brooks said. “They love it. When they show up, they are 110 percent all the time. I don’t ever have to get on anybody for not working hard or giving their best. They want it. They have a hunger for it and a desire for it, and it shows in practices. It shows in the summer. It shows in games.”
Brown, who said she can notice a decline in her performance when she’s taken even a few days off from practice, echoed her coach’s sentiment.
“It’s not, ‘Oh, we have to play volleyball today,'” she said. “It’s like, ‘Yay, we get to play volleyball today.'”
It’s that attitude that has gotten the ‘Feds to a 6-2 start this season, and they want to keep it up. Tori Brooks and Brown called their objective this season “ring chasing,” and the senior-heavy team talks about it a lot.
So even with plenty of tough opponents looming on the schedule, optimism runs rampant for Caledonia.
Just ask its senior captains.
“I hope we’re going to go far,” Brooks said.
“I think we will,” Brown added.
Theo DeRosa reports on Mississippi State sports for The Dispatch. Follow him on Twitter at @Theo_DeRosa.
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