JACKSONVILLE – A cool, late-January afternoon saw the Jacksonville State beach volleyball team begin its preseason preparation for the Gamecocks' 2017 season.
 
JSU will begin its second season of beach volleyball, the newest varsity championship approved by the NCAA last year. In 2016, JSU played a shortened 13-dual schedule during its debut season. The Gamecocks were the only institution from the Ohio Valley Conference to field a team in the sport's first year, and one of only two Division I schools from the state of Alabama along with UAB.
 
NCAA beach volleyball is played with 10 players from each school competing in five best-of-three matches between two-player teams. Individual games are played to 21, with the tiebreaker third game played to 15. Each match victory between pairs counts as one point, with three points required to win the overall dual. Beach volleyball consists of a smaller 16x8 meter court, compared to the 18x9 meter court used during indoor volleyball. The Trojans of Southern Cal won the inaugural NCAA beach championship in Gulf Shores, Ala., on May 8, 2016.
 
According to the NCAA, there are 53 Division I beach programs at the start of the 2017 season. This includes fellow OVC schools: Austin Peay, Morehead State and UT Martin who recently added teams.
 
The Gamecocks' beach team is primarily composed of indoor student-athletes and coached by the same staff. Head coach Terry Gamble's initial 2017 roster includes 11 members from the indoor squad as well as three beach-only additions to make the 14-player squad. Katie Will, a transfer from Carson-Newman University's beach team saw action last fall on the indoor team. She's joined by Jae-Lyn Visscher and Hailey Hughes who will make their JSU debuts in the sand this spring.
 
"I'm excited about our beach season," said Gamble. "We have a schedule which will challenge our players as we play several top-10 caliber opponents."
 
As part of JSU's challenging 2017 slate, the Gamecocks will face powerhouses Georgia State and Stetson who both made the inaugural NCAA Beach Tournament last season, as well as LSU, Tulane, South Carolina, Florida International and Florida Atlantic which all ended 2016 with top-20 national rankings.
 
In addition to Will, Visscher and Hughes, Jax State will also see beach debuts come from indoor freshmen: Sadie Anderson, Maddie Cloutier, J'Nae Fraser, Kaylee Frear, Kennedy Powell and Shayla Schmidt. Second-year returners Ashley Clingan, Hannah Kirk, Charis Ludtke, Mackenzie Rombach and Allyson Zuhlke will play the roles of seasoned-veterans with all of 13 career duals on their resumes. The combination of Kirk and Ludtke broke through for JSU's first-ever single-match victory last season as the duo scored four wins overall in 2016.  
 
JSU is coming off an 18-win season in the fall and a return appearance in the OVC Tournament. Gamble's team excelled just as well in the classroom with a 3.75 team grade point average. 90 percent of the team posted at least a 3.4 GPA or higher with 10 Gamecocks, eight of whom will play beach, boasting a 4.0 for the semester.
 
"I could not be more proud of what my players achieved in the classroom," said Gamble. "It was the highest GPA of JSU athletic teams, and is the best team GPA of any of my teams, and I've had teams with high GPA's before."
 
Jax State's season gets underway on March 3 in Birmingham with duals against UAB and Mercer. JSU will host OVC foe Austin Peay on Monday, March 6, at the sand court adjacent to Stephenson Hall. The Gamecocks' schedule also features road trips to Gulf Shores, South Carolina and a spring break trip through Florida.