National champs!

Please do not wake Mark Ethridge and his Kansas City Invasion 15 Black volleyball team.

The Invasion want to revel in the dream of having national champions stamped next to their name for however long it takes for the title to sink in.

“It felt so good,” Blue Springs’ Holly Tarvin said of the Invasion winning the USA Volleyball Girls Junior National Championship tournament June 26-30 in Reno, Nevada. “It was like the best feeling ever. I don’t even know – I’m speechless. It was the happiest moment.”

Tarvin is one of two captains on the Invasion, an under-15 group made up of girls from Blue Springs, Blue Springs South, Lee’s Summit North and three other area high schools. The team also includes Blue Springs’ Kourtney Thompson and Brianna Starr, Blue Springs South’s Alexa Armendariz and Lee’s Summit North’s Morgan Beal and Alexa Ethridge, the coach’s daughter and the team’s other captain.

“We’re going to celebrate together as a team, you know, then we’ll all split up and go back to competing against each other again,” Tarvin said.

Seeded No. 2 headed into the tournament, the Invasion went 10-0 in match play and 20-3 in games, beating teams from Southern California, Ohio, Texas, Nebraska and Northern California to take only the second open national championship from the Heart of America region (Kansas and Missouri).

The open division is the highest classification offered in USA junior volleyball and the junior national championship tournament is the premier event in junior volleyball.  

“In volleyball there aren’t as many sanctioning bodies as there is in (other sports),” said the elder Ethridge. “There’s really only one national championship that you have to qualify to get to – so this really is pretty legit.

“These girls really can lay claim to being the best 15-year-old volleyball team in the country. That’s pretty cool.”  

In the semifinals in Reno, the Invasion defeated the defending national age group champions, TAV (Texas Advantage) from Dallas, Texas, in two straight games in the best-of-three format. TAV downed the Invasion last year in Miami to take the under-14 national championship.

“It’s really exciting,” said Tarvin, who will be a sophomore at Blue Springs. “It’s a real accomplishment. Last year, after taking second, we just wanted to come out and show everyone that we could do it – like finishing it off.”

 The finals saw the Invasion handle Northern Lights from Minneapolis, 25-20, 25-14.

“You only want that to happen and you work for it – that’s the goal,” Alexa Ethridge said of winning the national title. “But when it actually happens, it’s heart-stopping. I’m still trying to wrap my head around it.

“It’s been amazing. I’ve been soaking everything in. It’s still fun to think about. It’s everything you ever thought it would be. Just to sit back and think that you’re the best team in the country – it’s hard to even think about.”

To prepare for the challenge of bringing the national championship trophy home, the Invasion played a rigorous schedule this season, traveling to Denver, Dallas, Omaha, Topeka and Springfield, Mo., in addition to hosting their own warm-up tournament in June to get ready for the national tournament. They completed their season 85-7-3 in match play, losing only four times within their age group.

“It’s really a disbelief,” Mark Ethridge said of winning it all. “You look at the sheer numbers of 15-year-old teams playing volleyball – just in our region, I think there’s something like 160 to 170 and I would have to think there’s upwards of 2,000 or 3,000 teams in the country that started the year off at that age group.

“You can dream it, but you really can’t believe it when it happens. It’s just rare. For me, personally, it was just hard for me to believe.”