After a trip to the Elite Eight round last season the Guntersville High School volleyball program is looking to build on their success in 2025, starting with a new head coach in Melissa-Paul Gardner.
“Coach Brittany Case did an amazing job with this program,” Gardner said. “Last season they went to the Elite Eight which is something they hadn’t done in a few years and was a big milestone. I want to build on what she did, I want to take us to the Final Four and in the end win a state championship, that will be my goal until the day I die.”
Gardner has a long history with the sport, starting back to her time playing at Hartselle High School where her team won the state championship in 2012. After one year playing at Wallace State College in Cullman she would return to coach eighth grade volleyball at her alma mater but after one year, she made a big move cross country to Indiana, becoming a coach at Munciana Volleyball in Yorktown, the longest running volleyball club in the country. Gardner would coach at Munciana for five years, later taking on the head coaching job at Cowan High School. In her first season in 2019 she took the team to a state championship win and a Final Four appearance in 2020 before departing to return to Alabama.
Gardener learned a great deal about the game while in Indiana, citing it as “one of the toughest volleyball states in the country.”
“The game should be fast,” she said. “Passing is more important that attacking as an aspect of gameplay, if you can’t pass you can’t open up hits on the ball. I feel like in Alabama we find those big hitters and just hone in on them but in Indiana it was all about the small game in the back court.”
Back in Alabama Gardner would coach two seasons at New Hope, reaching super regionals in her first season, while also helping to establish and coach the Bama Elite volleyball club in Guntersville with her husband Randy, a sister club to Munciana. Most recently, she was serving as an assistant coach at Calhoun Community College while still continuing to coach fourteen and sixteen-year-old teams at Bama Elite. She says that the call to come coach the Wildcats was the job she had been waiting for ever since returning to Alabama, noting the strong legacy of the program and remembering the times she had played against them in high school.
“Hartselle and Guntersville have never been rivals but every time we played them we always knew we were playing a great team,” she said. “It was always a tough matchup and I really think this program’s legacy draws a lot of people to volleyball and I want to keep that going.”
One of the most important things that drives Gardner is bringing attention and support to the game of volleyball. While a coach at New Hope she recalled the great support she received from the community which she believes helped carry them to the regionals her first year. When her team made its state championship run at Cowan she says she had a group of student fans that followed the team to every match, a mindset she wants to bring to Guntersville and show people the athleticism and fun that comes out during volleyball season.
“I don’t feel like volleyball gets the support in Alabama like it does in some other states,” she said. “I want people to see what a fast paced and fun game this really is and how these girls put their bodies on the line every single play.”
The team held tryouts just last Wednesday, with Gardner saying they had a strong turnout of around thirty-five students and a big participation from the underclassmen. Gardner will only have a short couple of months to prep the team, which will begin practice in June and work all through summer for the opener in August.
“It’s tough with how late in the game I came on but I feel confident in the coaches I have lined up and in myself,” she said. “With this team I think we can take these two months and get right where we need to be to get the season started.”
The Wildcats will open their volleyball season against Hayden on August 21 at Boaz High School.
