If you’re buying a house, the three most important things are -- wait for it -- “location, location and location.”
If you’re part of the boys volleyball team at Lancaster Mennonite High School, you want to follow the first three rules of Coach Anthony Hernandez (top left) – “communicate, communicate and communicate!”
The next three are equally important, the first-year boys coach says – “hustle, hustle, hustle!”
Communicating is key because “your center doesn’t know what your outside (hitter) is doing, and your outside doesn’t know what your center’s doing unless you guys are talking,” the enthusiastic Hernandez says he tells his team.
Also, “I really want them to hustle on everything, absolutely everything – on defense, on offense, even in practice.” At the end of the day, he wants to know “we’ve left everything out there on the court.”
Hernandez takes the reins with the guys after several years coaching the LMHS girls team.
To improve on last year’s 8-6 record, Hernandez is counting on seniors like Dylan Nolt (seated right), Billy Simms (seated left) and Eric Van (standing), who joined their coach at Lancaster-Lebanon League Spring Sports Media Day, hosted by LNP | LancasterOnline at Penn Medicine Park.
Nolt says the Blazers lost five starters from last year, so “this is really a new team, a new group of guys, but we’ve all been playing volleyball for a really long time,” making him hopeful.
Simms agrees.
“We’re pretty scrappy, so as long as we’re on our feet, we’ll be pretty quick,” he says. “We might not have a lot of height, but we also have a lot of chemistry, so I think that’ll help a lot.”
Lancaster Mennonite volleyball has a storied history, and all three players agree they want to add to that.
