In 2011, I am the head girls’ volleyball coach at Central Bucks East High School.
From 1999-2003, I was the head girls’ volleyball coach at Pennridge High School.
In the fall of 2001, East assistant coach Shelby (Bunting Keller) was a junior middle blocker on our team. Coach Katy Kutzner, Pennridge assistant coach Katie “V” Velez and coach Kelly Davis were all underclassmen on that Pennridge team.
Kelsey Arm (now a senior on the CB East team) was seven and Natalie Arm was three. Both girls were fixtures at all Pennridge volleyball practices, matches and the Pennridge concessions stand window.
Yesterday, 9-10-2011, CB East brought home silver medals at the Pleasant Valley volleyball tournament.
Ten years ago:
On September 9, 2001, my Pennridge team had played in the Pleasant Valley Tournament, and we brought home Silver Medals.
On September 9, 2001, we were on top of the world, but the morning of Monday, September 11, 2001, the world came crashing down with the twin towers, and nothing in the US has ever felt the same.
Students were sent home that horrible day, and there were no practices or games. The initial death toll was enormous, and it was growing with every click of the remote.
It seemed that everyone around us knew someone who was being directly affected by this incomprehensible tragedy.
On Tuesday, practices were canceled. Emergency personnel were searching for survivors, thousands of individuals were still missing.
When administration told us to resume practices, we all felt terribly torn.
How could we justify having fun playing the sport we love when so many thousands of people were still lost and were suffering and when our own hearts were so heavy?
We spent most of our first practice after 9/11 talking about how we could go forward since our volleyball seemed so small and so insignificant on this new and huge scale.
We resolved that day to focus on this single idea: to focus on the right (especially for girls) to play a sport that we love to compete in. This was one freedom that we could exercise as high school students and that we could fight for. We could justify going forward with this thought in our minds.
The United States sent our soldiers overseas and we went back to playing volleyball, fighting for points on the Pennridge court, but keeping all those who were suffering still in our hearts.
We kept our cell phones close by. We continued to have our Pennridge athletes sing our National Anthem (elevated to a new level of emotion and meaning) before all of our home games, we tacked our American Flag patches onto our green jerseys, and we went back to playing our volleyball schedule…vowing never to take for granted our right and freedom in the US for girls to play in sports.
--Submitted by Central Bucks East Coach Margie Arm
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