Perryville volleyball team goes to first final four

By the time Dave Mirly took over as coach of the Perryville volleyball team he had figured out how dumb he was, which helped a lot.

"I went in my first year as a coach thinking I knew everything, and then I remembered what coach [Tim] Rademaker said in Philosophy of Coaching," said Mirly, a Southeast Missouri State graduate. "He said that you basically spend your first 10 years of coaching trying to figure out what you're doing."

Mirly had spent a decade coaching boys basketball at New Madrid County Central, Chaffee and Woodland before he was hired to coach the Pirates.

"The smart coaches realize that they're dumb early," said Mirly, who had also coached volleyball at NMCC and Chaffee. "I wasn't very smart. I thought I was smart, but I wasn't, so when I came here I'd been coaching for 10 years already and I had learned a lot being at three different schools.

"You see a lot of different kids and athletes, lot of different administrators. And I, when I came here, had a good idea of what I wanted to do short term and long term. I had a plan for the girls that by my fourth year here we were going to go to the state finals."

Perryville players celebrate a point against Notre Dame during a match earlier this season. The Pirates defeated the top-ranked Bulldogs in the Class 3 District 1 championship game and have since advanced to the final four with sectional and quarterfinal victories. (Laura Simon)

He missed his deadline by two years, but Mirly will reach his goal today when Perryville takes the court at the Show Me Center for the Class 3 final four.

The Pirates will play Westminster Christian Academy (26-6-1) at 3 p.m. in its opening pool play game, followed by St. Pius X (25-6-3) from Kansas City at 5 p.m. and Pleasant Hill (33-1-2) at 7 p.m.

The Class 3 third-place game will be played at noon Saturday, while the championship will be played at 6 p.m.

"It's awesome," Perryville senior Natalie Gremaud said. "Just the fact that he's built up such a great program, and I get to be a part of it and be a part of something so special with these girls that have become my family since the beginning. It's just an awesome feeling."

No one around Perryville speaks about the team these days. They all talk about the program, which Mirly carefully has planned and constructed.

There are three rules that make up the foundation. First, players must have a good attitude. He's serious about this. The next girl removed from the team for an attitude that doesn't meet the team's standards won't be the first.

Second, players must work hard. The team spends the first 20 minutes of every practice doing a rotation of partner passing drills, many of which last about 45 seconds. He appoints someone to count the touches one random player gets during that time. If that number is not 200, the players are likely headed to a line to run.

Third, players must have fun.

"You have to enjoy yourselves out there," Mirly said. "And if you watch my teams play, I think you'll see all three of those things evident in about every game we play."

That's the case these days, but it took time. Perryville hadn't won a district title since 1997 before last year's breakthrough against Notre Dame and went 20 years between conference titles before last season.

"What I've learned at my other jobs as a head coach is when you come into a program you can't come in demanding all those things right away," Mirly said. "You've got to slowly incorporate them, so that was my plan. That's why I knew it would take me four or five years to be dominant, or to be really good."

Perryville finished 18-12 in 2009, when the seniors on this year's team were freshmen. The Pirates broke through with a 30-6-1 record in 2010 but lost to nemesis Notre Dame in the district title game.

Last season they reversed that result during a 29-4-1 season and fell just two wins shy of the final four when they lost to Lutheran South in a state sectional.

"He had different steps that he wanted to make," Gremaud said. "Last year was the first year that he didn't have a step. He just kind of expected us to go out there and play well. [One year] I remember he wanted us to play the way he wanted. The year before he wanted us to practice the way he wanted. ... He just kept building on and building on."

Perryville avenged the loss to Lutheran South in the quarterfinals this season to earn the first trip to the final four in school history and to claim their school-record 32nd victory of the year.

"When they were freshmen coming up, they just loved volleyball when they first walked in," Mirly said. "And the competitiveness that Natalie had really filtered out on everybody else because she's so competitive all the time. The rest of the girls weren't intimidated by her competitiveness. They thought she was crazy sometimes, but they were like, ‘Well, if Natalie's that competitive then I'm going to be competitive also.'"

Gremaud also happens to be the team's star player. She routinely attacks from all three positions in the front row and is equally dangerous from the back row, where she also sets. She has 389 kills this season, a school record and more than any other player in the Class 3 final four, to go along with 47 aces and 163 assists.

Senior Lauren Buxton has 363 kills. She didn't start to play volleyball until the seventh grade and first remembers meeting Mirly at a camp in eighth grade.

I really wasn't very good at all, but we all knew that we wanted to play so, so bad," Buxton said. "I think coach Mirly really took us to the next level even in those camps. We weren't even his girls yet, his team, but he still treated us like that and he coached us and taught us all the basics and what we needed to know. For then on, it's been us and him up against everybody."

Buxton and Gremaud are both 5-9, which makes them as tall as any of their teammates.

"We're the epitome of a good team because individually we're not as talented as a lot teams," Mirly said. "I would say Lutheran South -- my girls would have a hard time making the starting lineup on Lutheran South, but you put all six of us together out there on the court and it's something pretty special happening."

Mirly puts a lot of thought into a team motto for each season and stresses the need for each team to find it's identity.

He introduced the motto over the summer.

"I came up with the motto, ‘It's how big we play.' And then on our summer shirts, I also put at the bottom the date of state tournament. I told the girls that by the end of the season I expect me to be coaching you girls on this date. Most of them believed me -- wholehearted."

He said he wanted his players to understand that their work began then.

"I'm sure most of the other people who saw that out in the community and other teams probably laughed at us, but I was putting it out there to the team that I'm going to put it out there for everybody to see it," Mirly said. "We're not go around talking about it. We're not going to brag about it because you've got to earn it, but we put it on the back of our shirts, and they did it."

It took a lot longer for Mirly to settle on an identity for the Pirates.

"I actually did not figure out what our identity was until the Perryville tournament late in the season, and that's when I told them, ‘You're identity, what you've been searching for all year, is you guys just find ways to win. That's your identity.' And what a great identity to have.

"You don't blow anybody away with your offense, you never let the ball hit the ground and you're not flashy with it. You just find a way to dive on the ground and keep the ball alive. You put a up a decent set. Nothing stands out. If teams scout you, they're like, ‘It's just Perryville. They don't really do anything special.' But in the end the other coach is scratching their head going, ‘How did we lose to this team? How did Perryville beat us?' Well, it's because we just find ways to win."

Although Perryville has more wins than all but one of their final four foes, Mirly painted his team as underdogs. They were seeded second to Notre Dame in their district and didn't crack the state rankings, which are voted on by coaches, all season.

That doesn't mean that the Pirates are satisfied with just getting to play this weekend.

"We haven't accomplished a thing and we've got to go out and prove ourselves again," he said. "Yesterday at practice we talked about how great it was [to reach the final four] and how proud I was of them.

"We talked about how you just find ways to win, and then we talked about, ‘OK, now it's over. We've got three teams at state. We're the team that doesn't belong. We're the ones who slipped through the cracks. We've got to go out there, and we've got to prove that we belong there.'"