Adriana Jeanpierre, Beachside, All-First Coast girls volleyball award

• Adriana Jeanpierre has been named the Times-Union’s All-First Coast volleyball player of the year.
• The Beachside senior achieved career highs in kills, hitting percentage, and digs this season.
• Despite playing as an outside hitter in high school, Jeanpierre has signed to play as a setter for Mississippi State.

Spike after spike through four autumns, Adriana Jeanpierre kept whacking the volleyballs across the net at Beachside. A sure sign of a future college outside hitter, right?

Not so simple. As it turns out, Jeanpierre was becoming Northeast Florida’s best, all while playing a position that’s actually her second-best.

She’s not complaining. After all, in the big picture, adjusting to life as an outside hitter was only extending her skill set.

“You never know where a coach is going to put you, and you don’t want to have to say, ‘Oh, I don’t know how to do that,'” she said.

Through four years, Beachside’s hard-hitting Jeanpierre helped put Northeast Florida’s newest public high school on the state map, and now the senior completes her St. Johns County tenure as the Times-Union’s All-First Coast player of the year for volleyball.

A top contributor in all four years on Great Barracuda Way, Jeanpierre achieved career highs this year in kills (367), hitting percentage (.255) and digs (275) while boosting Beachside to the Florida High School Athletic Association Region 1-5A final.

Pretty impressive for a player who, in the future, will compete in college as a setter, not an outside hitter. And pretty impressive for a program that didn’t even exist until August 2022.

“At first, we were practicing in a middle school gym, because we didn’t have a gym [on campus] yet,” she said. “I think that brought us all together.”

SETTING UP VICTORY

Jeanpierre grew up in a Navy family, settling on the First Coast around 2019. It didn’t take long before Austin Lanteigne, now Beachside’s head coach, got the chance to see her in action.

“She had the combination of the athleticism and the ability to jump, even though she’s not the tallest, and the knowledge of how to play the game,” Lanteigne said. “It’s the perfect mix.”

Jeanpierre had tried a range of activities — “tennis, gymnastics, dance, you name it” — but she decided on volleyball late in her elementary school years.

“My mom was a volleyball coach and I would always go to practice with her,” Jeanpierre said. “I had kind of an early chance [to learn the sport].”

Early on, she said, she played libero in club volleyball. Then, she soon adjusted to life as a setter, the position in her future at Mississippi State.

But once she arrived as part of the first-ever freshman class at brand-new Beachside, she was joining a program that was long on setting skills — that class also included setter Erica Duffy, like Jeanpierre an All-First Coast selection heading to Division I volleyball — but not as deep when it came to hitting power.

So for four years, Jeanpierre unleashed her vigorous vertical leap to smack kills in bunches: 257 in her freshman year, followed by 331, 321 and finally 367, often nestled into the opposite corners. Along the way, she honed her timing working with versatile setters Duffy and Mollie VanDeusen, who developed the timing to seamlessly set up Jeanpierre or each other.

Now that she’s just as comfortable scoring herself as she is setting the table for teammates, she has a more complete feel for the action on the court.

“I feel like moving from an outside hitter at Beachside to a setter at Mississippi State helps me understand what the hitters need, like if I should set the ball higher so they can beat the block,” she said. “It gives me a double perspective so I can help them score.”

Jeanpierre is now looking forward to a future in Southeastern Conference volleyball and to learning the game at Mississippi State under eighth-year coach Julie Darty Dennis, formerly at Jacksonville University.

Outside hitter? Setter? Libero? What’s next?

“No matter what position she plays,” Lanteigne said, “she will make the program better with her versatility and her positive mindset.”

All-First Coast volleyball player of the year

Adriana Jeanpierre

Senior, Beachside

Age: 18

Resume: Recorded 367 kills, 275 digs, 31 blocks and .255 hitting percentage for Region 1-5A finalist Barracudas. … Florida Athletic Coaches Association all-star selection. … Completed Beachside career with 1,276 kills, 948 digs, 75 blocks, 37 assists and 156 aces. … Signed with Mississippi State as a setter.