Boys volleyball: UNO 17U Elite, filled with locals, captures national championship

Heading into a national tournament, teams want to get off to a strong start.

Unfortunately for the UNO 17U Elite boys volleyball team, that didn’t happen at the AAU Boys Nationals last month in Orlando, Florida.

UNO, which features players from area schools Joliet West, Minooka, Lincoln-Way Central, Plainfield East, Providence and Lincoln-Way East as well as Homewood-Flossmoor and Normal U-High, lost its first two matches July 4 at the tournament. That was decidedly not the ideal opening, but UNO rebounded in a way that came to define the team.

In fact, it rallied to win nine of its final 10 matches and walked away with the national championship.

After falling to AJV and Toreros, UNO ended the day with a win over Top Flight Maverick. On July 5, UNO beat Team Momentum Orange, Bay to Bay and SPVB. On July 6, it beat Cincy Attack Gold before losing to AJV once again and finished the day with a win over MOD Black.

On the tournament’s final day, UNO went 3-0, beating AJV in the quarterfinals, topping 630 Volleyball in the semifinals and CORE in the title match.

“At the age of 16, we could see that these kids had a lot of talent, even if some of them had never played club before,” UNO director Hector Kiely said. ”We believe that pressure makes diamonds and that fire hardens steel, so we put these guys in some tournaments that had pressure and put them under fire.

“The things they saw as 16-year-olds certainly helped them. They learned not to let the small stuff break them down.”

The UNO roster consists of Nicholas Boyce (Minooka), Jeremy Coleman (Normal U-High), Braeden Fawcett (Lincoln-Way Central), Nolan Fellows (Joliet West), Jackson Fowler (Providence), Hayden Hill (Providence), Janu Claud Inventor (Plainfield East), Drew Johnson (Joliet West), Luke Kirin (Minooka), Connor Latta (Minooka), Caleb Madden (Homewood-Flossmoor) and Gavin Olson (Lincoln-Way East). They are coached by Tim Doughney and Joshua Bradshaw.

“When this group was younger, they were a thorn in my side when I was coaching the older team,” Bradshaw said. “They just had that vibe that they were never going to stop fighting.

“To see all the hard work they have put in pay off this way, as a coach, it really makes me happy.”

Johnson was a part of a winning team at Joliet West this past spring, and he said that carried over into the club season.

“It’s very exciting to win a national championship,” Johnson said. “This is only my third year of playing club. The first year didn’t go the greatest, but then I got to play up on the varsity as a sophomore, and that helped me out a lot. The year after, we had a good club season and had a great high school season, going 30-6.

“The first day at nationals was a pretty rough time, but the big difference was how we came out and played our next match. Everyone played a big part, and we really came together as a team. We have a lot of good chemistry on this team, and it helped having been together for a couple of years.”

It was the end of a season that opened with a lot of optimism.

“We were very excited about this group at tryouts,” said Doughney, himself a Providence graduate. “We knew that it would take a lot of lessons, but they just kept improving like crazy.

“These guys were a much better team at the end of the national tournament than they were at the beginning of it. That’s hard to do in a week, but they did it, and we couldn’t be more proud of them.”