Ridgeland High School volleyball player Te’a Owens serves during a regular-season match last month. Owens, the Area 6-AAAA player of the year, will lead the Lady Panthers into the first round of the GHSA Class AAAA state tournament today.Ridgeland High School’s Te’a Owens is about as imposing as a 5-foot-5 volleyball player can be.
Typically an award like the GHSA Area 6-AAAA player of the year, which she was the recipient of this season, goes to someone seven to nine inches taller than Owens, generally based on their prowess at the net.
Well, there are plenty of 6-footers across Georgia who are looking up at Owens, at least in the statistical hitting categories. Among the schools that report stats to MaxPreps, Owens is the state leader in her classification with 523 kills and a hitting percentage of .586.
Owens and her teammates are coming off winning their area tournament Saturday at LaFayette and will host Carver-Columbus at 5:30 p.m. today in the first round of the Class AAAA state tournament. In other games involving Area 6 teams, runner-up Northwest Whitfield hosts Shaw at 5:30, regular-season champion Heritage plays at Northside-Columbus, also at 5:30, and LaFayette plays at Columbus at 6.
Owens first played volleyball when she was a sixth-grader at Chattanooga Valley Middle School.
“Some of my friends were trying out,” she said. “I wasn’t going to at first, but then I thought it might be fun. I guess I was actually decent at it and just kind of stuck with it.”
Owens played soccer and basketball back then and also played soccer her first year at Ridgeland before choosing to concentrate on volleyball. Since age 14, she has also played club volleyball with Choo Choo City.
Ridgeland volleyball coach April Lemonds recalled seeing her for the first time when Owens was a ninth-grader and sensed right away she had the potential to be a special player.
“She was on the varsity as a freshman,” Lemonds said. “And she wasn’t just on the team. She played.”
From there Owens has shown steady improvement. A major reason she’s such a weapon as a hitter is because of her leaping ability.
She used to do box jumps with a weighted vest. Now she sees an agility trainer and said her stamina is the best it has been in her career.
Lemonds said even this year that Owens, who has served 80 aces and is seventh in the MaxPreps stats with 450 digs, found yet another way to improve.
“This year she’s done a better job of picking herself back up when things aren’t going well,” Lemonds said. “I’ve told her a hundred times, her bad days are better than everybody else’s good days. I tell her, ‘Everything you do is not going to be perfect.'”
Although the Lady Panthers are 25-10, there have been times this season when things weren’t going well for all of them. They entered the area tournament as the No. 5-seeded team because they had a 2-4 league record in the regular season.
After Ridgeland beat LaFayette on Thursday in the first round of the area tournament, the Lady Panthers lost their first match Saturday to Heritage. It was close, as Owens said all of this year’s matches against Heritage have been, but she said they gained confidence from it and consequently won out.
“We never gave up,” Owens said. “That’s one thing about us. And we’re a short team, so I think most teams think we can’t hit, but we can. Our defense is solid. Our defense has gotten better throughout the season.
“I feel great going into the first round of the state playoffs. If we keep our energy up, I think we can beat them. We’ve never made it to the second round of the state. But I think this year if we play our game we should be able to.”
Contact Kelley Smiddie at ksmiddie@timesfreepress.com or 423-757-6653. Follow him on Twitter @KelleySmiddie.