Six months after losing a gym and some of their homes to the Palisades Fire, a volleyball team from West Los Angeles brought home the national gold.
The SMBC Shack volleyball team’s 16-year-olds clinched victory after six hours of play at the AAU Boys’ Junior National Volleyball tournament in Orlando, completing an undefeated season.
“We’ve been through so much. We worked so hard, and we finally won. We could finally just let everything out,” said Sam Schwartz, a player who lost his home in the fire.
The last match lasted about two hours, the longest Coach Ethan Marshall said he’d ever seen.
The disaster gave Schwartz and fellow teammates a drive to overcome, which he said they used to rally in the second set.
After a nail biting third set, the team secured a 29-27 win.
The Palisades Fire began on Jan. 7 in a Santa Ana windstorm, ravaging thousands of businesses and homes along the Los Angeles Coast.
Among the damaged structures was the team’s main practice facility, Palisades Charter High School’s gym, forcing the team to find new practice facilities.
Despite the improvisation, Marshall said the team remained “fluid and adaptable.”
Marshall scheduled practices and care packages in hopes of providing a distraction from the things the fire took from them.
“We tried to do as much as we could to take their minds off of it,” he said.
Like many of his teammates, Schwartz said he found comfort in volleyball.
“I still have volleyball, That could have been gone too, I still have a school. I still have friends,” he said. “It really gives me the mindset of (being) grateful for what I have right now because you never really know what happens.”