Despite being new to that coaching position and also having a new last name after tying the knot this past weekend, Kelly is no stranger to MVL.

A 2016 MVL grad, Kelly was a multi-sport athlete during her time there, playing volleyball, basketball and softball. She took over the head coaching spot for the Chargers varsity volleyball team this year in place of Amy Pearson, who stepped down last year after a six-year run.

Kelly had several goals in mind for her first year as head coach and even though not all were attained, arguably the most important ones were.

“Going into it, I obviously had high hopes, everybody does,” she said. “You start coaching a new team or you start coaching, period, you have high hopes winning most games if you can, but the more behind-the-scenes stuff, too, is what I really wanted to focus on as well. Building positive relationships between me and the girls and facilitating a love for the game between the girls and the game itself were really important for me going into this.”

(Kettner) Kelly

The Chargers struggled to get into the win column this year with a talented but very young team as they finished 3-20-2. Despite how the team looked on paper, Kelly got some words of advice from her dad, Kory Kettner, a long-time coach in the area and current owner of MN RISE Basketball.

“I know it’s still … on paper it wasn’t the best season,” Kelly said. “I had a lot of encouraging words from my dad, who does a lot of coaching, who reminded me that I can’t measure the success of this season based on wins and losses, so that was encouraging. But I do think that I was able to build the relationship with the girls that I was hoping to build and I think they found a newfound love for the game and improved in their skills as well, which is also the main goal, too, to become a better player.”

The Chargers put a lineup on the floor that was mostly sophomores this season and will only graduate one player from the team in 2025, senior Claudia Weisensel. This year’s team boasted athleticism and a three-headed monster attack led by junior Marley Schauer and sophomores Olivia Hammer and Jenna Bates.

“Just right off the bat, they are so athletic [laughs], I can’t believe how athletic they are,” Kelly said. “Their commitment and their willingness to learn and to take what I’m saying as they were just getting to know me this season. A lot of them didn’t know who I was before this, so you have to build that level of trust. To see that and for them to be knowledgeable about the game at such a young age and be willing to keep learning about the game was one of their biggest traits.

“They’re so adaptable, they can take what we’re saying and put it into practice right away. Just skill-wise, too. Some of our best passers were younger on the team and they were putting up such good numbers with digs and getting us some good looks on our offense then.”

That attack couldn’t have been as effective, however, if it weren’t captained by sophomore setter Avery Freier.

“I have to give major props to my setter,” Kelly said of Freier. “At the beginning of the season, I told her, ‘I know you’re young, you’re just a sophomore, and I’m going to be asking a lot of you pretty much being the quarterback on the team, you’re deciding how our offense is run here.’ And my goodness, she did such a good job of getting good looks and knowing who the hot hand was and making some smart decisions in that case, too.”

The team’s youth led to some entertaining matches this season, but it also played a role in the team’s finish for the year, a Section 2AA playoff loss on the road to Maple River in three sets last Thursday.

Maple River was defeated by MVL 2-0 earlier in the season in a tournament at United South Central High School and was beat again by MVL in five sets at MVL on Sept. 26. The third time was the charm for Maple River, however.

“Volleyball, in my opinion at least, is 20% skill and 80% your mentality and your drive and your grit,” Kelly said. “So if you’re having an off night and you’re letting that get to you, that can kind of get in the way of any other success. I think our serve receive, for example, or sending balls out of bounds on offense, whatever it might be, and letting it get away from us versus just fixing the error right away could be seen as our Achilles’ heel.

“And I think that all ties together with our youth, too. Improving that skill and improving that mindset and mentality comes with experience. So, I have full confidence that we will continue to improve on that as a team in the years to come.”

Regardless of how the season ended, Kelly credited her players for doing as well as they did because most of them didn’t play together in any form until their freshman year due to coming from different Lutheran grade schools around the area.

“So they’re kind of at a disadvantage in that case sometimes where they don’t have that chemistry right away,” Kelly said. “Then to throw them on the varsity team as a freshman or a sophomore, you’re playing with new people and this is a really high level of play, and I think that’s a lot of the time where our youth was shining through.

“And despite that, we put up some really good fights. There were some really good battles, we were getting really good looks offensively, our defense was doing really well for a lot of our games. To that point, too, we implemented a lot of new concepts with the girls at the beginning of the season. We switched up where they were going to be covering defensively and we started looking at new ways to run our offense.”