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By TYLER RALEY | Special to the Reporter

NORTH SHELBY – The Oak Mountain Eagles are breaking in a new coach following a season to remember, but a season they look to improve on in 2024.

The Eagles bring Anna Claire Harris to the helm of the program after a stint in Class 4A with Curry High School. The team hopes she can bring continued success to the program after the 2023 campaign ended with a loss to Bob Jones in the regionals.

“I think that a lot of times (the players) can get stuck in this thought process of, ‘We’re 7A, but we might not be the most competitive or the strongest,’” Harris said. “There has been a shift in that mindset already. I think it probably happened about two weeks ago and you can tell that they’re competitiveness is stronger. I think that going into the season, paired with the strength of their chemistry, I think that the mindset shift of being competitive every single point, I really do think that that’s probably going to be our underlying strength.”

Oak Mountain holds a large and strong junior class this season, but Harris is also relying on her handful of seniors to help set the foundation for these juniors to build off of when they graduate.

Harris has seen the bond between these two groups grow and believes that this has been a crucial positive light in the offseason.

“Because they have played together since middle school, their thought process is cool to watch because you can tell that they trust one another,” Harris said. “I’m super excited to continue building the fact that, ‘Hey you guys are great volleyball players, you know the sport of volleyball,’ but kind of trying to break the mold in their minds of everything being structural.”

The senior class is led by middle blocker Aubrie Lay, who Harris believes has the most energy of anyone she has ever seen on the volleyball court.

The first-year head coach feels she is going to be a serious leader when it comes to picking her team up mentally while also being a force on both sides of the ball.

Her leadership helps a couple of juniors succeed as well in outside hitter Caroline Whitehurst and libero Anaya Patel.

For Whitehurst, she thrives on her passion for the game, and Harris says that she is one of the hardest workers on the team, constantly going above and beyond what she is asked to do in practice. Patel is the same way, moving smoothly while being very driven. Harris believes those two will be a key to the entire team’s determination to win this year.

The level of determination that the team has has been a point of focus this offseason, and Harris has seen the improvement in that department skyrocket in just a short time on the job.

Harris’ goal as a coach is to build the confidence and game knowledge in her players so that they can go out and perform well against competition like Hoover and Thompson in their area, which she has seen as a positive learning opportunity so far.

The goal for the team, like every school, is to ultimately win a state championship, but in order to win the games necessary to reach that point, they need to go on scoring streaks and build momentum, or as Harris likes to call it, winning the battle in “runs of three.”

If the Eagles can go on those streaks, they will be in a solid position to win crucial games. If not, just the opposite will happen, making it very difficult to achieve success.

It will take a lot of working together for Oak Mountain to repeat and build on what it did last year, but it is very possible, and that is something Harris strongly believes.