Avenall the right choice to lead Clarkston into volleyball history

CLARKSTON — Kelly Avenall doesn’t always speak kindly of herself as a high school student. That’s common when a teacher and coach looks back on their youth.

“I was kind of a band geek in high school,” she laughed.

Avenall is a 1989 graduate of Clarkston High School. She played the rare instrument Oboe, a double-reed instrument of the woodwind family, during her prep days.

Avenall is also a part of another family, the Clarkston volleyball family. She is the mastermind who has coached perhaps the most successful run of any coach of a program that has a long history of success.

Avenall and the third-ranked Wolves made history Tuesday night, getting past fifth-ranked Plymouth Canton in a five-game, 2-hour, 11-minute marathon. That contest was the Class A state quarterfinals. The win makes history at Clarkston, sending the Wolves into the Final Four for the first time.

“I still can’t believe it,” smiled Avenall.

G.O.A.L. DAYS

Clarkston volleyball has plenty of history, winning dozens of league and district titles under three other coaches prior to Avenall. In fact dating back to the origination of the school’s volleyball program in the early 1970s, Clarkston has won 15 league titles, 17 districts and three regionals, including the past two years.

But no Clarkston volleyball team has played on the season’s final weekend until now.

Avenall was part of one of those aforementioned league championships. That was 1988-89, Avenall’s senior year. As an outside hitter, Avenall and the Wolves captured the old Greater Oakland Activities League (G.O.A.L.). They did not get out the district that year.

Avenall played under former coach Gordie Richardson (1985-2003), whose girls volleyball and track & field teams at Clarkston were always overachieving and were as known to be as tough as nails.

Avenall embodied that type of Richardson-coached teams back in the 80s.

“Kelly was always tough, mentally tough,” recalled Richardson, who noted that Avenall replaced him as volleyball coach in 2003 after his retirement from coaching and teaching. “She was always a hard-working kid, a really bright kid — really smart with mathematics. She played one of the hardest instruments in band, the Oboe. She was a really bright kid. She was the type of kid that you knew would be successful in life.”

Avenall teaches at Clarkston Middle School, where she coached volleyball for many years. When Richardson announced his retirement and subsequently moved to Gaylord, Mich., Avenall put her name into the hat to succeed her former mentor at the varsity level.

She got the job. Less than nine years later, she has the Wolves where no other coach could take them: The coveted Final Four.

“Kelly’s proven to be the right choice, a more successful coach than me,” noted Richardson, who never got past the regional finals as head coach but had several top-10 girls track teams at Clarkston. “Everything you hear and see about Clarkston volleyball says she has taken it to a new level.”

THE DIRECTOR'S CHAIR: Clarkston volleyball coach Kelly Avenall has taken the Wolves to their first Final Four in her ninth season at the helm. Photo | Larry McKee, www.lmckeephotography.comn

OAA VOLEYBALL

The Oakland Activities Association was formed in 1994 with schools from a collection of leagues. A total of 22 schools from the G.O.A.L., Metro Suburban Activities Association and the Southeastern Michigan Association, plus one school each from the Suburban Athletic Conference and Saginaw Valley Association, came together during a period where mega leagues were forming all around the state.

Four more schools came over from the Macomb-Oakland Athletic Conference the next school year and the league has seen a revolving door of schools since then, with three Farmington schools coming on board in 2001 while two schools have since closed and another four schools have left for the Macomb Area Conference and Flint Metro League. A couple of years ago, Oxford came into the league, an upgrade to the volleyball of the OAA.

While the OAA has featured some great teams in all sports, with more than 50 state championships, it has become one of the state’s toughest leagues in prep athletics in Michigan. There has been some competitive volleyball teams in recent years of the OAA with several teams making it through to the regional rounds. Still, only seven schools have advanced to the state quarterfinals since the beginning of the league, including Clarkston and Lake Orion this season.

Clarkston is the only team to make it to the quarters in consecutive years (2010 and 2011) with Birmingham Seaholm the only other team to win two regionals as a member of the league (2001, 2003). Clarkston has done so with Avenall, who has proven to be the right choice on the sidelines.

Since becoming coach, Avenall has helped take the Wolves from a respected team in the Metro Detroit area to a state powerhouse. Clarkston won the OAA Division I title in 2003-04, Avenall’s first year, and have added league championships in 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010 and 2011, good for six leagues in nine seasons. Clarkston has won five straight in the league, more than any other program in any division of the OAA since the league’s inception some 17-plus years ago.

In the state tournament, Clarkston has won five straight districts and seven in nine years under Avenall. To put those even more impressive numbers into perspective, no other OAA school has been able to do that in volleyball in the same time span — no other OAA school is even close.

Between 1994-95 and 2002-03, Richardson coached two league and five district titles while Clarkston was in the OAA. Avenall has been able to surpass that in her first decade, and will likely pass Richardson’s eight total league and eight total district championships during her career.

Ironically, Lake Orion is making its first Final Four appearance in volleyball since 1987-88, Avenall’s junior year at Clarkston, and she played against that team several times. During her senior year, current OAA member school Rochester Adams made the state semifinals.

In another chapter right out of the book of ironic, Lake Orion and Adams are the last two OAA schools to reach the Final Four in volleyball, and that technically was the before the formation of the OAA. Lake Orion (G.O.A.L.) and Adams (M.S.A.A.) are both currently in in the OAA Red Division with Clarkston this season, with Lake Orion finishing second to Clarkston this fall in the league standings.

Clarkston and Lake Orion are the first schools in the league to make it this far since the start of the league. Troy (1980) and Ferndale (1976) also made it to the Final Four, while Ferndale was the Class A state runner-up in 1976, which was the first year the Michigan High School Athletic Association sponsored a state tournament for girls volleyball.

HEADED FOR BATTLE CREEK-TOWN

At 1 p.m. on Thursday, Avenall and her 12-member Wolves, along with assistant coaches, will take off from Clarkston and head west to Kellogg Arena in Battle Creek.

The town of Battle Creek is an old manufacturing town in south central Michigan known for its wide array of cereal factories. Kellogg’s calls Battle Creek its home. Clarkston’s volleyball family will just be a visitor, hoping to make it a three-day stay in the Cereal City. The Wolves plan on having a couple of breakfast meals there, including a last meal Saturday morning. They are ready for the big stage.

Battle Creek is where the MHSAA hosts its Girls Volleyball Final Four and the Team Wrestling Elite Eight each year. The MHSAA also hosts its baseball and softball semifinals and finals only five miles down the road.

Each year, dozens of high schools come to the town of Battle Creek chasing state championship dreams. Avenall and Clarkston are one of them. This is a site where Clarkston hopes to make some OAA history, or be a part of for the league so starving for volleyball perfection. Even if Clarkston loses Friday, the league will still play for some state glory.

No OAA school has ever won a state, not before the inception of the league or since its creation in the summer of 1994. The OAA will have a school in the state finals automatically, as the winner of the Clarkston-Lake Orion showdown will play Saturday afternoon at 2 p.m. against the winner of the contest featuring Temperance-Bedford and Rockford.

Avenall’s team is 2-2-0 this season against Lake Orion, beating the Dragons in the OAA Red Division league championship match one month ago. The Wolves have owned the league in recent years under Avenall.

Even Clarkston’s overall record the past three years speaks volumes of the Wolves’ success. They were 43-9-1 in 2009, 48-4-1 in 2010 and 55-5-0 this season — and Clarkston has not lost in over a month. This was somewhat of a surprise to everyone, considering that Clarkston graduated seven of 12 players, including four starters, and sent six kids to the college ranks of last year’s state quarterfinals squad.

This might be Avenall’s best coaching job yet. Clarkston has won 19 straight matches. It hopes to make history for the school and league this weekend with two more wins.

Gordie Richardson, Avenall’s former mentor, said he will be able to make the trek downstate on Saturday if the Wolves are to advance to the title bout. A lot of the Clarkston faithful will. Richardson has kept an eye on his former player and has kept in touch through e-mail and text messages.

“I never made it as a player,” laughed Avenall, who had an academic scholarship to Hillsdale College but did not play collegiate volleyball. “I had to come back and get to the Final Four as a coach.

“I do hope Gordie can be there. I haven’t seen him in person for a long while,” added Avenall. “I would love to have my former coach there, especially if we make it to Saturday.”

If all of this happens, it will be a special moment for Clarkston, a town that has not won a state championship since its girls cross country team won three straight Division 1 titles from 2003-2005 and the girls tennis team captured the crown last June.

It is also a town now knowing it has the right person in charge of its volleyball program — now and for years to come.

(Daniel Stickradt is Senior Editor of the AdaVan Media Group’s www.northoaklandsports.com and a veteran sports journalist of 18 years. He can be reached at dan.stickradt@northoaklandsports.com or follow on Twitter @LocalSportsFans.)

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