Photo by Jake McNeill. Marshall outside hitter Reese Drake leaps up to attempt a hit during the Class AAA girls volleyball quarterfinal match against Monticello at the Excel Energy Center in St. Paul on Nov. 6. Drake was named the 2024 Independent Volleyball Player of the Year.

MARSHALL — In the 2024 season, the Marshall girls volleyball team fielded a younger and less experienced team than it does most seasons. The three-time reigning state champions had just two seniors on the roster and were underrated by their lofty standards, ranked No. 6 in the preseason coaches poll. Still, the Tigers defied expectations and put together another run to the state championship with a young talented core. Among the key components of that run to the Class AAA championship was junior outside hitter Reese Drake, the 2024 Independent Player of the Year.

“I appreciate all the recognition. I was excited to hear about it, but in the end, it really does come down to a team award,” Drake said. “We wouldn’t get any of these awards without the success our team has had, and all the recognition and hard work that we put into our season.”

Drake finished the season with a well-rounded stat line of 505 kills, 483 digs, 24 ace blocks and 36 service aces. Beyond the volume stats, she was efficient with her numbers, recording a .279 hitting percentage and a 98% good serve rate. She was also named to the Class AAA All-State and All-Tournament teams.

“Reese was able to score against anyone that we played this year,” Marshall head coach Dan Westby said. “She has developed a number of shots from the outside that have helped her become an effective attacker. Her all-around game helped her become an All-State player.”

Last season, Reese Drake was a third-team all-area selection. Her older sister, Kennedy, was a second-team selection after recording 475 digs as the Tigers’ libero before going on to play defensive specialist for Southwest Minnesota State. While Reese doesn’t specifically remember when she first picked up the sport, she said that playing in the yard with Kennedy, and her neighbors Jayda and Lexie Bednarek helped her develop her love for the sport.

While the numbers tell the story of how effective of a hitter Drake has the ability to be, she’s not your typical outside hitter. Standing at 5-foot-8, she’s been several inches shorter than her fellow hitters and her opposing blockers. Still, she’s found a way to use her explosive leaping ability to overcome the height difference.

“I’m an undersized hitter and I was always like, ‘Yeah, I’m going to pass or whatever,’ until Mr. Westby said, ‘We need you to hit,'” Drake said. “I knew I just needed to fill that role for my team. Even though sometimes I knew I wouldn’t be the biggest hitter and wouldn’t pound the ball, I knew I could find other ways to score from my team, whether it’s using off-speed or all those other shots I have.”

She added that she’s been able to use her blockers to help find open spots on the court, allowing her to take a more varied approach to her hitting.

As someone who came up passing because she said Westby always said, “If you can pass, you can play,” Drake’s skillset is versatile. She said she doesn’t have any preference as to where she plays, doing whatever she can to help her team in the front and back row, and said she’s been approached about playing front and back row when she looks to continue her volleyball career at the collegiate level in two years.

In Marshall’s 2023 state championship run, Drake was a key role player, earning All-Tournament honors. While she was instrumental in the last win, this year was different. The Tigers had graduated five of the nine players who played in all three sets of the state championship match, including four starters, so Drake had to step up into more of a leadership role. 

“Last year, I had the seniors to kind of bring me in and teach me all the things that they know,” Drake said. “I’m very competitive, so I try to lead by example on the court all the time…  We always say your age doesn’t matter. You have the same role on the team as anyone older or younger than you, so I feel like we tried to kind of tell [the underclassmen] that it doesn’t matter [that they’re less experienced]. Try to make sure that they’re calm before those games and the big games are just like another game. You just have to go out there and compete and try to calm them down.”

In the heat of competition, Drake described herself as having a never-die attitude. As such, she tries to instill that same confidence in her teammates.

“Part of it was just my team relied on me, so I felt like I could never be down on myself. Because then the team would be like, ‘Oh no, Reese is down, we can’t do this,'” Drake said. “I felt like I had to make sure I was always being positive and bringing that for them.”

Matches that Marshall finds itself struggling are few and far between. Before this year’s state championship match, they hadn’t lost a match to a non-Class 4A opponent since 2021. In the rare instance in which they are down, Drake said that the team just aims to return to the fundamentals to regroup and work together as a team.

Heading into the year, Drake said that the team wrote down goals like getting 1% better each day, winning the section and conference and advancing to the state tournament. While the team did think about the fact that, in a rare turn of events, the Tigers weren’t ranked top 5 in the Class AAA preseason poll, Drake said the players thought about it but tried to brush it off and take things one match at a time.

“We were very junior heavy and all of us have played together since we were young, so I feel like we were all very close. Just going to compete against some of my best friends and with this team was definitely one of my favorite parts,” Drake said. “Just going to see them every day at practice and then we’d spend every day of the week basically together.”

The strategy paid off as Marshall picked up ranked wins over Willmar and Stillwater Area to start the season. The Tigers worked their way up to No. 2 in the rankings as they headed into the postseason.

For the first two rounds of the section tournament, it was business as usual for the Tigers as they swept their way through the competition. Yet, a Willmar team that Marshall swept earlier in the season gave Marshall trouble in the section title match, claiming the first set 27-25 to hand Marshall its first set loss since 2021. 

Still, the Tigers rallied for 25-21 wins in each of the next two sets and Drake took over offensively in the fourth set as the Tigers pulled off the clincher, 25-8. She had a match-high 23 kills in the win. 

The Tigers swept their way through their first two state tournament matches. Top-seeded Delano had lost to No. 5 Alexandria in the semifinals, making Marshall the high seed in the state championship match. While Drake had 20 kills and 20 digs in the match, Alexandria upset the second-seeded Tigers in four sets.

“It wasn’t the outcome we hoped for, but we were so proud of getting second at state. I mean, Alexandria was a very good team, the game was close all the way through, but I think just experiencing this loss will help push us and make us better,” Drake said. “Make us work harder at practice. It definitely wasn’t the outcome we wanted, obviously, we wanted to get that four-peat and bring it back, but it just didn’t work out that way. But it’ll motivate us next year for sure.”

Drake will now turn her attention to girls basketball for the winter season, a sport in which she was first-team all-area as a sophomore, and will look to build on that success at the prep level for another year in both sports after that. 

Drake said that she wanted to thank her coaching staff for working to make the Tigers better each day and thank the Marshall B-squad for coming into practice and competing to push the varsity group.