Spiking the ball is the thing that really draws the boys at NCSSM-Durham into volleyball, says Sue Anne Lewis, longtime Community Coordinator and assistant women’s volleyball coach at NCSSM-Durham. Competition, strategy, teamwork: that all plays a part, too. But nothing gets the guys on the volleyball court fired up like an absolute rocket of a spike.

“They love to hit the ball as hard as they can,” Lewis says of the young men who have come through the club volleyball program at NCSSM-Durham the last four years. “Once they do that a couple times, that sucks them in, and they end up falling in love with the game.”

Come spring, that love for the game – both Lewis’s and that of the boys at Science and Math who play – will become part of NCSSM’s official, North Carolina High School Athletic Association-sanctioned varsity volleyball program.

Persistence

The idea for men’s volleyball, Lewis says, began with Felix Kritzinger ’24. Kritzinger was from Charlotte, where club volleyball had been a growing trend for a number of years under the leadership of grassroots organizations and supporters in the region. A similar effort in the Triangle was beginning to emerge. Kritzinger, who was working during the Fall Semester of his junior year at NCSSM-Durham as a manager for the women’s varsity volleyball team, suggested to Lewis that she partner with him in starting a men’s club volleyball team on the Durham campus. 

Lewis declined. More than once. Between work and personal responsibilities, her time was limited. But Kritzinger persisted until Lewis finally agreed to take on a leadership role.

“I said to Felix, ‘All right. We’ll do it this year,’” Lewis recalls. “We’ll try to play a few games, try to get it started a little.”

Kritzinger immediately set out to hype what was coming in the spring by promoting recreational co-ed volleyball on Sunday afternoons in the school’s gym. He even chartered a student volleyball organization through NCSSM-Durham’s student government to lend the effort legitimacy and organization.

Though the club was originally his idea, Kritzinger deflects credit for the emergence of men’s volleyball at NCSSM-Durham. “Sue Anne completely committed,” Kritzinger said. “She took the idea that we started with and then just ran with it and got everything organized incredibly fast.”

Lewis turned to the school’s leadership for institutional support and found it from Terry Lynch, Vice Chancellor for Student Life & NCSSM-Durham’s Chief Campus Officer. She also sought out and received grant funding from volleyball-focused nonprofits and the UNC Association of Student Governments, the student-led umbrella association that advocates collectively on behalf of all schools in the UNC System.

“My support and the chancellor’s office’s support really was just to offer encouragement,” Lynch says. “Every once in a while, there would be a little bit of funding that would be necessary to help support the team, but really, it was just general support to say, ‘Yes, this is something we can do.’ Being able to fold it into the larger athletics department now as a varsity sport will be a value add.”

The efforts of Kritzinger and Lewis paid off; 32 boys showed up for tryouts for men’s club volleyball in the spring of 2023. And with the help of North Carolina Boys Volleyball Association, the grassroots group shepherding boys’ club volleyball in North Carolina, NCSSM scheduled eleven matches.

Volleyball, Lewis said, is one of the rare sports with an accessible entry point. Participation and competitiveness doesn’t require an apprenticeship in a series of escalating local or travel leagues. Kids who have never played before can pick up the game fairly quickly. And fairly quickly, Lewis saw that, though many were volleyball novices, the players possessed raw talent and – true to the nature of NCSSM students – a drive to excel.

Lewis had planned to approach that first year of club volleyball with some measure of restraint as far as expectations. But when she saw what she had, she revised her thinking.“I had told Felix, ‘Oh, we’ll just play a few games and just let it be from there, and use this year as a building year.’ Well, I decided, no, we’re going to play for real.”

Prior to NCSSM, Kritzinger had been on the varsity tennis team at his home high school. The volleyball team at NCSSM felt very similar, even though it was still technically a club team.

“Maybe we weren’t officially varsity, but we had everything in the same way that all the varsity NCSSM sports had,” Kritzinger said. “We were on a very similar schedule. We got packed lunches like how the girls’ varsity volleyball team did and all the other varsity teams did. It was a very well-put-together system.” 

Immediate success

In NCSSM-Durham’s first year as a club team, they made it to the 16-team club championship in Charlotte. The following year they won their conference championship and had Kritzinger named Conference Player of the Year. In their third year the club advanced to the quarterfinals of the state playoffs.

What started as a somewhat tentative dip of the toe into men’s competitive volleyball was transforming into a focused and intentional effort to establish a meaningful presence on NCSSM’s menu of opportunities. Lewis found herself developing not just a team. She was developing a culture. 

“I would say a team is just a group of people that shows up to play together,” she says. “I wanted to turn this into something that hopefully is a learning experience for students, an opportunity for growth. I want us to have standards, expectations, goals, accountability, you know? I want to have some integrity about us.”

The culture Lewis was working so hard to create fully formed in the club’s fourth year. The team entered the state playoffs as the number five seed. First to fall to NCSSM-Durham in the tournament was the fourth-seeded team. Then came a victory against the number one seed on the road, followed the next night by another road win over the number two seed.

The team finally ran out of steam in the championship game. But the run through the tournament established NCSSM-Durham as a legitimate contender.

“Nobody had to expect us to win,” Lewis says. 

Nobody outside NCSSM, that is. “I told them at our very first meeting when we were talking about goals, that of course, every team’s goal was to get to the championship, right?” Lewis says. I told them, ‘If you want to get there, we can get there. You have the right people here, and we have what it takes to get to the state championship.’ And so, when it came down to it and it was on the line, they showed up. It showed their true resilience and grit.”

That resilience and grit is evident in the classroom as well. In addition to the incredible success the club teams found on the court, the team members were equally as successful in the classroom. NCSSM-Durham’s men’s club volleyball team won three Team Academic Awards in four years from the American Volleyball Coaches Association, and in the last two years earned Honor Roll Distinction, which is awarded to the teams whose grade point averages were among the top 20% of boys’ teams in the country. 

It’s official

In April 2026, the North Carolina High School Athletic Association officially sanctioned men’s volleyball as a varsity sport. Tryouts in Durham for the spring 2027 season are set for February 15, with an anticipated first game sometime in March .

Greg Jarvis, NCSSM’s Director of Physical Activity and Wellness, and the Athletics Director for NCSSM-Durham, is eager to get the season underway.

“Men’s volleyball will be a great addition to our varsity athletics program on the Durham campus,” he says. “There is a lot of interest, excitement and success in men’s volleyball as it moved quickly to varsity status. I am excited to see the sport grow within our conference and state.”

Damian Romero is an NCSSM-Durham senior originally from Northside High School in Jacksonville. He and the other returning players have been chatting a bit in the off-season about the team’s new varsity status, but thanks to the way the club team was run, he expects this year to be business as usual.

“I feel like it’s just going to be the same process,” he says. “We’re just trying to win it all.”

But winning it all has not, nor will it ever, define the value of the program for the students who play. Lewis has surveyed each of her teams formally or informally throughout the seasons. A lot of her players said that they would not have played a sport at NCSSM were it not for volleyball. Some went even further in their praise of the program.

“A lot of them have said that being on the boys’ volleyball team was one of the best, if not the best, things about their Science and Math experiences,” Lewis says.

And not just for the student athletes. “At first, when Felix asked, I didn’t think I had the time, but I was like, ‘All right, I’ll do it for you,’” Lewis adds. “But I’ll say this: this has become one of the highlights of my 20-some years at Science and Math.”

Editor’s note: NCSSM-Morganton has had a men’s club volleyball team for two years and will also put its first men’s varsity volleyball team on the court this coming spring.

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