The Florida Southern athletic program is starting up a women’s beach volleyball program for the 2017-18 season. The NCAA officially approved beach volleyball as a championship sport in 2015.
Jill Stephens, Florida Southerns head coach and director of volleyball operations, was insistent upon bringing the sport to her school. Stephens wanted to bring the sport to FSU in order to improved and increase the opportunities for prospective female student-athletes.
“It has been a huge goal of mine as an administrator for Title IX purposes in adding another female sport, and that is one of the prongs of Title IX, to meet the needs and desires of our female students,” said Stephens.
The current indoor assistant coach, Hyrum Keime, is set to assume the head coaching duties for the women’s beach volleyball team. Keime has been an assistant with the team for four years, also playing for the United States Volleyball Junior Olympic beach volleyball team in 2000.
“It is super exciting to be one of the first Division II teams to have a program and to be on that frontier and forefront of the sport, leading the way for the Sunshine State Conference,” said Keime.
There is only one other school in the SSC with a beach volleyball program, Eckerd College, Keime is hopeful that other teams in their conference will follow in their footsteps. In order for beach volleyball to be an official conference sport, a conference is required to have six schools participating in the sport.
The team will first begin training for the beach season in the fall of 2017, with the first matches to be played in the spring of 2018.
Leave a Reply