Saraland volleyball coach Dana Mason has the Spartans on a path toward their first state championship. (John O’Dell/Call News)
By JIMMY WIGFIELD
SARALAND — The desire to win does not always end when Saraland coach Dana Mason walks off the volleyball court.
Her husband, Jay Mason, can attest to that.
“When we first got married, we had this little shed in the back yard and we would go out there and most people would just have fun playing ping pong,” she said. “Well, we are just going at it, super competitive, like I’m not going to lose.”
Mason, 40, was first married to a love of competition, which began when she played primarily softball and volleyball growing up. She is obviously a winner; her record is 522-208 in 19 seasons as a volleyball coach at Citronelle, her alma mater, and Saraland. She seems to have peaked the last three years, going 133-19 and maneuvering the Spartans into position to reach the Class 6A state championship round for the second consecutive year.
But for Mason — who started playing sports at 4, including tee ball with the boys — it’s not just the winning she craves.
It’s the noise, the thumps of the volleyballs leaving somebody’s hands, the sound of the cheers bouncing off the walls and even the inherent fussing that accompanies being a coach.
“Half of my life, I’ve been coaching,” she said. “Pretty much all of my life, I never really flipped the switch. It was just the camaraderie of the noise. Now, there are times when I go home and I have to tell my husband, ‘I’m going to go outside.’ We have horses at home and I just have to go outside and reset and refocus. But when I do that, it’s like something’s missing, like (the noise) is not there.”
Mason admits to being a perfectionist and, much like her brother, Saraland football coach Jeff Kelly, must balance being encouraging and collecting all the mistakes in a basket and trying to run them through the shredder.
“It never shuts off,” she said of her perfectionist nature. “It’s like an expectation. You can never let the girls or the guys feel like they’re comfortable or they’ve done enough. And I think for me, at the end of the day, it’s like, well, did I really tell them how great they did? Because you don’t ever want them to get too comfortable. Because when you get too comfortable, then things slide. How many times have you just sat back and been like, ‘Jenny, that was a great year or a great such and such?’ I don’t do that enough and I know that. I want to be better with that but it’s like for kids these days, it seems like you can see them at their best when they don’t get too lax. The second they get too lax, it’s like everything falls apart.”
But Mason is not going to compromise on her demands of maximum effort and maximum efficiency.
“I know that we’re going to mess up,” she said. “Mistakes drive you crazy. But if you hit it into the net for the second time, they have to get over it. It’s more of a mental game. These kids are dealing with so much, whether it’s at home or friends, relationships, whatever. Even on the court, you’ve got to think, next point, next ball, whether it was good or bad. Because the game changes so fast. My thing is, you’ve got to just not get too high, not get too low, but we talk all the time about the standards.”
Unlike in football, where the backups can come in when a rout is on and run the clock, volleyball players still have to spike the ball and serves must still go to players who are struggling to keep them in play.
“A coach knows when the player on the other side of the net is down,” Mason said. “Of course, you’re going to keep serving it to them because you’re showing the whole gym how they’re feeling.”
Saraland is feeling good these days. The Spartans (39-6 with 30 sweeps) are going to the Super Regionals in Montgomery this week and, they hope, to the state tournament in Birmingham the week after that. Mason has seven seniors and an excellent resume, including wins over perennial state powers McGill-Toolen and Bayside Academy, who have a combined 54 Blue Maps.
Saraland has beaten the Admirals twice in the last two years and Mason said last year’s victory marked an important developmental juncture in her program.
“I think at that point, they’re like, you know, we can do this,” she said.
This year, the Spartans lost to the defending Class 7A state champion Dirty Dozen and runner-up Bob Jones in early sweeps, then beat both later in the season.
Mason designed a tougher schedule this year to better prepare her players to hold a Blue Map.
“We’ve played so many more competitive matches than we did last year,” she said. “The schedule that we’ve had, I feel like it has been perfect to prepare them coming into this home stretch.”
A state championship would be a heady accomplishment for a coach who was all-county in volleyball but said she was too short to play for West Alabama when she tried out. So, she decided to stay close to home and play softball. Mason became an NAIA softball All-American and academic All-American at Spring Hill College, where she still holds the school record for the least strikeouts in a season (two in 2005).
“I love playing softball but I love coaching volleyball because the game changes so fast,” she said. “Like the momentum, the intensity, it could go from one end to the other so fast.”
That tempo, and the scant turnaround time between matches, is daunting.
“It has to be a lot on their bodies,” Mason said of her players. “It’s very wearing for me just coaching. I don’t compete like they do. I haven’t even done anything. I can’t imagine what they feel like.”
Kelly said he couldn’t handle the fast pace of coaching volleyball.
“You don’t have time to let the world fall,” he said. “That has got to be a challenge. I would not be very good at that. She handles it really well and it probably takes a lot of poise and discernment to know when to be tough and when to really drop the hammer and when to be a great encourager.”
But both brother and sister owe much of their success because they engender loyalty among their staffs, which promotes consistency.
“I don’t think that it could be done with just us, by ourselves,” Mason said. “I think both of us surround ourselves with people who understand how important the teamwork is and value teamwork. Without them, we would not be as successful as we are. There’s a lot of loyalty to us and we put a lot of trust in those people and we hope that they do feel they are valuable.”
If Saraland wins its first state volleyball championship, Mason said she hopes she can enjoy the ultimate triumph without worrying about when the next one will come.
“You need to celebrate the great things that have happened before you focus on the next,” she said. “It’s always, ‘What’s next?’ So, just kind of pause, breathe and celebrate those accomplishments that those kids have had.”
