Knoch volleyball program got started by gym teacher Heard 50 years ago
JEFFERSON TWP — Knoch girls volleyball coach Diane Geist has plenty of respect for history.
Especially the history of the program she's been involved with for 36 years.
“A teacher stepped in and coached (Knoch volleyball) for a year or two,” Geist said. “Besides that, it's been myself and Jean Heard.
“I admired her for everything she did, for standing up for girls sports. She was an advocate for girls sports at a time when not a lot of people were.”
Heard died last spring. She formed Knoch's first-ever high school girls volleyball team 50 years ago.
Heard was a girls gym teacher at the time.
Seniors on that first team included Leslie Wolf, Judy Franke, Linda (Cypher) Milich and Carole (Fennell) Keck. Joyce Fennell, Carole's younger sister, was a sophomore on that first team.
“We used to play volleyball intramurals and a lot of girls were playing when Miss Heard decided to start up a varsity team,” Wolf recalled. “She put in so much work getting it approved.
“We had no problems finding teams to play. I remember Fox Chapel, North Hills, North Allegheny were on our schedule. We played two games a week.”
They won none of them.
In fact, the Knights never won a set, let alone a match.“She saw the (athletic)potential in girls,” Keck said of Heard.“Even though we never won, it was so much fun. She (Heard) kept it fun for us,” Wolf said. “She kept the interest in the program going.”Basketball and track and field were the only other girls sports at Knoch at the time volleyball got started.Fennell, who was also a gymnast, became close friends with Heard through the years.“Jean was a very unique person,” Fennell said. “She coached the same way she taught in school — very caring and compassionate. She was a great coach and an even better person.”Knoch's first volleyball team did not have its own uniforms. The girls wore boys' gym shorts, T-shirts and hand-me-down tennis shoes when they played.They ironed their own uniform numbers on to the back of their shirts and tied white bows to their shorts “just to let people know we were a girls team,” Wolf said.They played their games in front of primarily empty gyms.“Except for our parents coming to our games, maybe, we were a team of unknowns,” Franke said.But they were a team nonetheless.“We weren't going to win any Olympic golds, obviously, but we played hard every game,” Milich said. “Being the first team, we took a lot of pride in that.“I stood maybe five feet tall, not very big at all. We did our best.”Girls volleyball was played differently then. Teams didn't substitute out and nobody rotated. Three girls played in the front, three in the back, and nobody vacated her position during a volley.“When the ball came to you, you hit it,” Wolf recalled. “There weren't many designed plays to set somebody up and nobody was flying around all over the place like the game is played today.”Keck said Heard made it a point to make sure everyone on the team got a chance to play — something she learned to appreciate.“My sister, Joyce, was the athletic one in my family,” Keck said. “She was on the basketball team, I was the team statistician.“At the encouragement of friends, I decided to give volleyball a try. Being part of a team for the first time ... I've never forgotten that. Ten years later, I played church volleyball.”Though that first Knights team had good times in defeat, Heard emphasized that “losing is nothing to laugh about,” Franke said.But she learned losing wasn't the end of the world, either.“Playing on that team taught me to accept losing as a part of life ... and life goes on,” Franke said. “You don't have to win to benefit from sports.”Wolf laughed when looking at her high school yearbook, which included that initial volleyball team.“There was a snippet in there, 'you have to start somewhere,'” Wolf said, chuckling. “What else were they going to say about us?”Knoch eventually became successful in the sport, winning the PIAA volleyball championship in 2017.Geist credits the formation of the program as much as anything.“There's been rule changes through the years, club volleyball picked up, girls are playing more often, are more athletic — but every program has a beginning,” Geist said. “Those girls stuck it out.”Now they feel like a part of that state title a few years ago.“Absolutely,” Fennell said. “We were on the ground floor of that program. Seeing the way it's flourishing today, yeah, I feel like we had a hand in that.”
