Sports
Valley volleyball club wins gold in Las Vegas
In the summer of 2020 when COVID had everyone shut down and living in seclusion, Tiffany Hawkins decided to build herself a home volleyball court so she could give local youth volleyball lessons.
She started with one player, then seven. By the summer of 2021 she moved her lessons and growing volleyball club to an indoor gym and finished that summer with 20 volleyball players – middle schoolers and high schoolers – focused on learning and becoming their own volleyball club.
Fast forward to this May when Hawkins’s Cool Sunshine Volleyball Club took top honors at the 11th annual “In It To Win It” tournament in Las Vegas, Nev. Cool Sunshine Volleyball Club brought two teams and both walked away undefeated as gold division champions.
“I am beyond proud of the work our girls put in,” said Hawkins, who is the creator and director of the club.
Hawkins is Alamosa born and raised. She was part of the 1996 Alamosa High state championship volleyball team and fulfilled her own dream of playing collegiate volleyball at Adams State. She finished her last collegiate match by breaking Adams State’s record for most kills in a match.
“I spent the first season as a red-shirt to get my eligibility up and then played two seasons for Adams, starting every game,” she said of her collegiate career. “Volleyball has always been a bright spot in my life and I do my best to share that love for the game with my athletes.”
The Cool Sunshine Volleyball Club includes athletes from eight different school districts in the San Luis Valley – Alamosa, Monte Vista, Del Norte, Sargent, Sangre de Cristo, Sanford, Centauri, and Center High.
The traveling volleyball club is organized as a public 501(c)3 nonprofit and this year used Sangre de Cristo High as its home gym. “I wanted the club to be about the athletes and volleyball, not about making money,” Hawkins said of Cool Sunshine’s nonprofit status.
She and the club’s coaches worked with 38 volleyball players this season. In addition to their gold status in Las Vegas, Cool Sunshine Volleyball teams won the Gold Division Championship at the Rumble at the Ranch tournament in Casper, Wyo., and the USA Volleyball Rocky Mountain Regions in Denver.