WILSON EXTRA: Sacco: Not looking forward to the end

FISHERSVILLE

Leave it to the tough-talking coach to bring the house down, as rock stars may or may not still say, just a little bit.

Leave it to the NASCAR-watching, death-stare giving volleyball skipper to be the first one to wax poetic about her group of Green Hornets even as they dash around her in a giggling flurry of tie-dyed shirts and black shorts.

Leave it to the yellow-card getting Kim Claytor – Wilson’s fifth-year varsity volleyball coach — to do the unexpected. To make you raise your eyebrows in surprise when her voice cracks just a bit and a few tears make their home in her eyes.

“I always knew this time was going to come,” Claytor says, shooting a glance toward her 10 players all huddled up and joking before practice. “This group right here? I don’t know. It’s gonna be tough to let them go.”

“This time,” of course, is the Group A tournament that starts tonight at Wilson when Northumberland comes to town for a 7 p.m. quarterfinal. “Letting go,” as you should know, can happen anytime between tonight and Saturday.

It’s a sad fact of coaching and falling in love with a group of players that might as well have your DNA spiraling through them – at some point the end-match comes. And it’s coming soon for Wilson.

It could come tonight. It could happen Friday in Richmond. The final day is written in stone – Saturday.

And losing these girls, not any match, is what brings Claytor down to earth after she boarded the Funkadelic Mothership to the Sun on Saturday when her Hornets swept defending Group A champ Strasburg and earned the right to host tonight.

“You don’t want to talk to me,” she says. “I’m just along for the ride.”

Nah, that’s not how it works. No matter how much a coach will spew that good-for-print quote; when you’re in the know, you know that the coach is as much a part of the team as the players. And in Fishersville, the team wouldn’t have it any other way than Claytor being in charge.

“At first, I was really intimidated playing for her,” says Jessica Arbogast. “Because I’ve always been scared of her. But once I got to varsity, I wasn’t scared of her anymore. We’re really close.”

Even Claytor’s signature death stare is something they love.

“You mean the ‘you will not lose this game today’ look?” says junior Noël Bartley. “It’s the intimidation factor. Ooh. She tries to scare us to make us play better.

“It works.”

Arbogast, who was afraid of getting cut from varsity when she made the jump from JV, just looks at it as a coach caring enough to get mad when they don’t do well.

“She’s amazing,” Arbogast says.

She’s awesome, they’ll tell you in unison. She’s the reason they’re here.

“She’s really nice once you get to know her,” says Trisha Bruce.

This is the first group of seniors to come and go under Claytor’s watch, making the bond as strong as the craziest of glue. A bond that nobody is looking forward to giving away.

“I’ve been dreading this year since last year,” Bartley says, looking around at the seven seniors that will leave her this week. “I’m going to cry my little eyes out.”

When Claytor has to let go is up to the team. That decision is made on the court.

If it were up to the players, it would never end.

“I wish I could play with this team until I was 30 years old,” Arbogast says.

Then it’s back to the giggling. Back to the running. Back to the inside jokes that nobody not wearing a green volleyball jersey would get. And Claytor stands there, her hands on her hips, and watches them.

And repeats a familiar refrain.

“It’s going to be hard,” she says.

Claytor never finished her thought the second time around, but managed to smile as she watched them laughing.

Again.