“I am very excited to welcome Mara to our Northwestern volleyball family,” said Nollan. “She has NCAA and international experience and has proven she can score points in big matches. I can’t wait to get her in the gym this winter to join in our preparation.”

Štiglic, an outside hitter, is coming off a sophomore season that earned her first team All-Mountain West honors. In addition to a team-high 431 kills over 32 matches, the sophomore also logged 29 service aces and 63 blocks for Utah State. All together, she tied for first on the team with 4.08 points per set.

That followed up an impressive first-year season for Štiglic, who recorded eight double-digit kill matches during her first fall in Logan. In addition to 52 digs, 30 blocks and seven aces across 15 matches in 2024, Štiglic’s 156 kills put her second on the team in kills per set, at 2.79.

A Rijeka, Croatia native, Štiglic made a name for herself on the national stage prior to her collegiate career. In 2019, she became the youngest player in HAOK Rijeka club history to start as a standard player, debuting at just 13 years and 11 months. Over a span of five seasons, she helped her team to numerous national and international honors, including silver medals in both the 2020 and 2021 U18 National Championships, and bronze medals in both the U16 and U18 National Championships during the 2021-22 season. In 2022, Štiglic helped lead the Croatian National Team to a fifth-place finish at the U19 FIVB Women’s World Championships, scoring 101 points along the way.

“Thank you, Northwestern, for this incredible opportunity to take my volleyball and academic career to the next level!” said Štiglic on the move. “I’m honored to be a part of this community and can’t wait to contribute to the team.”

 

COLLEGE STATION, Texas (KBTX) – Texas A&M volleyball fans waited nearly two hours outside Reed Arena to welcome the national champion Aggie volleyball team back to Aggieland with high-fives, signs and cheers. After the team’s arrival, just after 1 a.m., head coach Jamie Morrison, libero Ava Underwood and opposite hitter Logan Lednicky spoke words of appreciation to the gathered crowd.

Copyright 2025 KBTX. All rights reserved.

Here are the postseason honors for the 2025 Washington County high school volleyball season (all averages are per set):

2025 Herald-Mail Volleyball Player of the Year

Caydence Doolan, North Hagerstown

Doolan, a senior, is the first three-time Herald-Mail player of the year of the 21st century. She set a county rally-scoring record by averaging 7.35 kills while leading the Hubs to their fourth straight appearance in the Class 3A state final. She earned AVCA All-America second-team honors and was named to the coaches’ all-county and Central Maryland Conference large-school first teams. She also averaged 3.43 digs and 0.85 aces. She will play college volleyball at Division I Marquette.

KANSAS CITY, Mo. — A few days before the NCAA women’s volleyball national championship, Texas A&M opposite hitter Logan Lednicky posted an old family video on her Instagram account. Lednicky is maybe 5 or 6 years old in the video, wearing a maroon A&M shirt and doing cartwheels on the grass at Kyle Field, A&M’s football stadium. “Say ‘Gig ‘Em, Aggies,'” her mom, Leigh Lednicky, implores her, and little Logan walks up to the camera, smiles and gives a thumbs-up.

Under the video, Lednicky wrote that she is living in that little Aggie’s “answered prayers.”

Her dad, Kyle, was a long snapper for the Texas A&M football team in the 1990s, and her mom worked in the football office. She chose Texas A&M because she always dreamed of being a fourth-generation Aggie, but that was only part of it. She wanted to help build a middling volleyball program into a powerhouse.

Lednicky went beyond that little girl’s dreams Sunday, swatting 11 kills to lead Texas A&M to a sweep over No. 1 seed Kentucky for the program’s first national title. The senior from Sugar Land, Texas, was a linchpin in the Aggies’ improbable December postseason run, helping her team knock off three No. 1 seeds in the NCAA tournament.

In the final four matches of her career, when it mattered most, Lednicky amassed 69 total kills, a team high. She’s one of four seniors who have been with the program from the beginning — they went 13-16 as freshmen — and set the tone for the historic season. The past and present swirled through that class Sunday. With the Aggies cruising in the final set, coach Jamie Morrison high-fived Lednicky, and hung on to her hand.

“I think she had that moment where, ‘This might be the last four points of my college career,'” Morrison said. “I think she actually started getting a little teary on the court. I was like, ‘Oh, no, did I just ruin everything?’ No, it means the world.

“There was a group of them here from the beginning that said, ‘I want to be a part of this, I want to build this program.’ … I don’t think they were envisioning a national championship by the time they were done. I think when we were selling what we were doing, it was building something they could come back to in the future and be really, really proud they helped build.”

It was Lednicky who helped save the season on Dec. 13 in the Sweet 16, when the Aggies were down two sets to Louisville. She hammered a team-high 20 kills in a reverse sweep, and afterward, Lednicky mentioned a random note that someone left on the scorer’s table as her team was teetering toward elimination.

The note said, “Something great is about to happen.”

She has always been the charismatic optimist — the one who keeps things loose. Teammates call her everything from their “ride-or-die” to a best friend.

She has been a recruiter. When Morgan Perkins hit the transfer portal after her freshman season at Oklahoma three years ago, her first text came from Lednicky, an old club teammate. Perkins said the text was something along the lines of, “Hey, Mo-Mo, I see you’re in the portal …”

Lednicky, along with sophomore Kyndal Stowers, helped pull A&M together when the Wildcats sprinted out to a 15-9 lead in the first set. The Aggies later said they dealt with some jitters at the start of the match, but it was short-lived. Lednicky’s kill drew A&M within one, and then she teamed up with Perkins for a block that tied the game. Stowers’ kill completed the rally and gave the Aggies the set, 26-24.

From there, the Aggies dominated. They took a commanding 19-8 lead in the second and pulled away in the third with a Lednicky kill that made it 18-11.

“I was pretty emotional all day today,” Lednicky said, “just knowing that no matter the outcome of this game, it would be my last getting to represent A&M on my chest. Being able to do this with these girls — end like this, I just can’t even believe it.

“I’m so happy I get to carry this with me through the rest of my life and remember all the memories with these girls.”

In the waning moments of the match, a corner of the arena chanted, “Why not us?” It became a slogan for the Aggies in the postseason, during the match against Louisville. Late Sunday, Lednicky gave a shoutout to her boyfriend and teammate Ava Underwood’s boyfriend for coining it for the Aggies at a concession stand in Lincoln, Nebraska.

“We kind of took it and ran with it,” she said. “We started saying it. Ava and Addi (Applegate) wrote it on their shoe. Now it’s on a T-shirt somehow. Shout out to them.

“But, I mean, it’s true. It’s a testament to the hard work this program has put in all year long, staff, players. That’s such a great statement. ‘Why not us’ has turned into, ‘It is us’. I think with that dawg mentality all season long, all tournament long, we knew it was going to be us.”

Morrison, who came to A&M in December 2022 and overhauled the program’s culture, figured it would take at least five years to win it all. He credited the rapid ascent to his team’s work ethic.

Kyle Lednicky waited for his daughter after the match, marveling over how she and her teammates set out to change a program and did it so quickly, and dramatically. He said former A&M football coach R.C. Slocum texted her Sunday morning and wished her luck.

“That was pretty cool,” Kyle Lednicky said.

Of course he always hoped his daughter would go to his alma mater, but he says he never put pressure on her. Maybe it was osmosis, that all those football games, and that maroon clothing, would eventually seep into her consciousness, and her heart. It didn’t matter. That fourth-generation Aggie is now a first-generation champion.

Kyle Lednicky saw his daughter’s Instagram post Thursday, and it brought back a flood of memories.

“I had to put it away,” he said, “because I got teary-eyed when I was looking at it.”

At a point when most rowers are pounding away on rivers in the wind and rain through the dark winter months, a new breed are honing their skills in brighter climes surrounded by sun, sand and waves, all the while dreaming of the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics.

Out of 17 sports that proposed an extra discipline to the International Olympic Committee, rowing came out on top with its beach sprints format added to the LA 2028 programme. While many may have noticed the addition of five new sports in baseball, cricket, flag football, lacrosse and squash, a mini-revolution is happening on the water within a sport that will no longer have a lightweight category but will have five coastal rowing events in 2028.

Coastal beach sprints shake up this most traditional and predictable of sports by taking the core elements of rowing – a need for extreme levels of fitness and psychological toughness – and adding new layers of jeopardy and a beach-party vibe. The discipline involves a head-to-head format and begins on land with athletes running down the beach and jumping into their boats at the water’s edge, then racing out around a buoy before hurtling back to dry land, leaping out of their boats and sprinting up the beach. With frequent close finishes, their final move is to hurl themselves through the air to hit the finish line buzzer first and land, usually, with a face full of sand.

In a world where people have greater choice over which sports to watch and participate in, and minor sports’ world federations are considering how to stay popular and relevant, coastal rowing offers a less predictable and more entertaining format, while simultaneously reconnecting with a historic activity that dates back to around 1900BC in ancient Egypt where it was a significant mode of transport.

We might be a footballing nation first but this is a great addition for Team GB as we also excel at sitting-down sports and boats are part of our national island identity. We also gain a new impetus to revitalise sport and activity around the coastline in areas that have become some of the most socially and economically challenged parts of each of the home nations. The Welsh government identified that its major sports event funding was going into big cities and realised the importance of reaching and engaging a different part of the population by hosting the coastal rowing world championships in Saundersfoot and developing the Wales international coastal centre there.

Scotland has embraced the sport with St Andrews University investing in the wider flat boats used to row on the rougher waves and stepping up to become one of Britain’s 11 coastal sculling academies at East Sands Beach. Meanwhile, Glenarm in County Antrim hosted the All-Ireland Coastal Rowing Championships this summer for both beach sprint and endurance coastal rowing events. England’s coastal academies include clubs in Tynemouth, Scarborough, Whitby and Lowestoft, alongside many south coast clubs with a strong heritage in the activity. Sandbanks in Dorset was the venue for the first Commonwealth Beach Sprint Championships in 2018, followed by Namibia in 2022, and Barbados next weekend.

Britain’s Guin Batten, a member of the silver-medal quadruple sculls crew from Sydney 2000 and one of the first British female rowers to stand on a podium, has been masterminding the logistical and political course to get to this point. As chair of the World Rowing coastal commission in her spare time (and deputy chief executive of Volleyball England the rest of the time), Batten describes the two disciplines of coastal and classic rowing as the “yin and yang of the sport”, different yet beautifully complementary, both at their core about brilliant boat skills and athletic prowess and yet each providing such a contrasting spectacle to watch or participate in.

Boat costs and accessibility issues have been cleverly reduced – the wider boats are suitable for beginners and those racing at the highest level, unlike the incredibly narrow hulls that require significant expertise to master in still-water rowing. Countries don’t have to fly their equipment over as a pool of boats is provided, adding another unpredictable factor as participants won’t try out the actual boat they’ll race in until two days before they compete. At that point, they’ll need to study the boats and in particular the fin positions on the hull, which will be key to working out the optimal “buoy-rounding” techniques, all the time knowing they’ll need to judge everything again on the day once they see the size of the waves that Mother Nature chooses to throw at them.

New Zealand’s Emma Twigg, the 2024 Olympic champion and five-time Olympian, has reinvigorated her love for being in a boat by taking up the coastal discipline and won at the recent world championships in Turkey. Twigg told me she had fallen in love with beach sprints because of the “closeness of the racing”, “the beach volleyball vibes”, plus the benefit that you can watch the entire race from start to finish in the mini-stadium area, avoiding one of the insurmountable challenges of Olympic still-water rowing where you cannot ever see the whole 2km distance from one vantage point.

Like their classic still-water cousins, coastal rowers will still need to develop a formidable physiology that can both sprint and endure to compete in up to three races in a day. Each race is a lung-busting, all-out effort with an arm-wrenching, shoulder-shuddering effort to make a 180-degree turn round the buoy mid-race. New Zealand’s Olympian Finn Hamill missed the buoy by centimetres to get knocked out at the recent world championships, while Moritz Wolff, the leading favourite from Germany, stumbled in the semi-final in the beach sprint allowing Spain’s Ander Martin to come through in the closing seconds to face the reigning American champion, Chris Bak, in the final who held on to retain his title. There’s a mix of existing rowers transitioning to this new discipline and others coming in from coastal clubs, while sports scientists and performance directors work out what future coastal Olympians will look like.

The world’s best coastal rowers will share the Long Beach LA venue alongside open-water swimmers, windsurfers, foil and kitesurfing champions over the fortnight of the Games and show a different side to this otherwise seemingly strait-laced sport. Rowing’s answer to snowcross, BMX and beach volleyball is coming to LA, but if you live near the coast, then it may be coming to a beach near you soon too.