By Mike London

mike.london@salisburypost.com

SALISBURY — Gray Stone Day’s volleyball serve sails in fluffily, with plenty of air under it.

Stationed on the right side on the back row, Salisbury’s Ava Morris waits patiently for the ball to descend. She doesn’t have to rush, doesn’t have to adjust laterally at all, calmly sets her feet and already knows exactly where setter Ashley Yang is going to be. Arms fully extended above her head, like she’s reaching for a can of soup on the top shelf, Morris executes a textbook pass.

Volleyball is a three-touch game. Morris has made the first one. Yang is about to make the second one.

Yang has a routine play in front of her and an easy decision to make, as her momentum carries her on a quick slide from right to left to make the set.

Reliable Dayami Acevedo is the hitter on the left side. Yang flicks her an ideal ball to crush. Acevedo stands 5-foot-8 — the Hornets aren’t blessed with 6-foot outside hitters  — but she times her leap properly and there’s enough force behind her swing that she overpowers the two Knights teaming up to try to block her.

Statistically, it’s an “attack” and a “kill” for Acevedo, which means it’s an “assist” for Yang. You can’t get an assist, no matter how perfect the set is, unless there’s a kill attached to the end of it.

There’s a stoppage of play after Acevedo’s kill. Dr. Steve Yang, notable dentist, World Series softball coach, Salisbury volleyball statistician and Ashley’s father, has gotten a ref’s attention. The ref knows him, and the ball is taken out of play and handed to Ashley.

She flips it to her father in the bleachers, like Mike Geter making a pitch to a running back.

The Gray Stone folks, lots of them with ties to Rowan County, are gracious hosts, and there’s an announcement that Yang has just achieved her 2,000th career assist. That’s a substantial number of assists at a school that is not a traditional power and doesn’t normally play a ton of postseason matches.

The NCHSAA record for assists is over 4,000, but 2,000 is nothing to sneeze at.

There’s a celebration, happy signs and commemorative balls, and rightfully so, when someone gets 1,000 of anything in volleyball. Four digits, a grand, that’s a career achievement that doesn’t come without a combination of talent and work.

Gray Stone fans applaud the announcement. Yang smiles sheepishly at the small fuss that’s being made about her, especially at a road game. Acevedo animatedly claps her hands like a cheerleader and strolls over to forcefully high-five Yang. Morris, a 5-foot-8 outside hitter who has played with Yang a long time and has delivered the kills to finish almost half her assists, steps away from her position briefly to bear-hug Yang.

“A lot of people got kills for to me to get 2,000 assists,” Yang said. “Ava, of course. Lots of them by Ava. I was fortunate to play with Brooke Cunningham and Riley Peltz when I was younger. And there’s Dayami. There’s Kendall Henderson, Carmen McQueen, a lot of girls.”

Yang is the younger sibling of a locally famous older sister. Ellen Yang played softball, volleyball and even baseball at a high level for the Hornets. In baseball, which had its season at a different time than softball during her COVID-plagued senior year, Ellen played second base next to shortstop Vance Honeycutt, the recent first-round draft pick of the Baltimore Orioles. Batting ninth, Ellen scored quite a few runs on hits by lead-off man Honeycutt.

As a youngster, Ellen was part of the 2015 Rowan Little League softball team that won the World Series, with her father serving as head coach.

Ashley Yang matched Ellen’s feat in 2019, winning her own World Series title, again with Dr. Yang serving as head coach.

While there are a lot of similarities between the Yang girls, both Salisbury setters and softball sluggers, there’s at least one important difference. Ellen was a softball player at heart, who happened to be good at volleyball. Ashley is good at softball, but volleyball is where her heart is.

“Volleyball always has been No. 1 for me,” Yang said. “That surprises people because of my family. Ellen was such a good softball player, but I didn’t want to just try to follow what Ellen did in sports. Volleyball gave me a chance to have my own sport, to do my own thing, to find my own way. And my dad knows everything anyone could possibly know about softball, but in volleyball, I actually get to coach him sometimes. I kind of like that.”

Yang was bitten by the volleyball bug when she was 11 years old. She played on a 12U team organized by High Rock Volleyball Club and was fortunate to be coached by Kelan Rogers, an East Rowan graduate who has been a long-time high school head coach, first at West Davidson, and for the last 16 years at Carson. A lot of girls who have Rogers as their first coach decide that volleyball is their favorite sport.

Yang has played for a long list of different club teams since then.

She thought seriously about playing college volleyball for years, and that was a goal, but she’s 5-foot-5, which limits her future setting opportunities to small schools. So she’s looking forward now to a future as a normal college student.

“I know I really want that big-school college experience,” said Yang, who hopes to enter the sports media/journalism field. “College basketball and football games (at UNC) have been a huge part of my life growing up.”

Yang arrived at Salisbury post-COVID, so she’s had four full seasons to rack up assists. She had 495 as a freshman, 603 as a sophomore, 660 as a junior, and 295 so far this season. She surpassed 2,000 at Gray Stone Day last Monday, even though the Hornets didn’t play their best there. After mid-week CCC romps against North Rowan and Thomasville, she has a total of 2,053 assists.

While her primary responsibility has always been setting, Yang is going to get 1,000 digs (she has 868). She’s a strong server and she has contributed 239 kills. She’s good at seeing the open areas available if blockers rotate too quickly.

She’s also in a leadership role for the Hornets that comes naturally to her. Head coach NyAsia Harris says Yang is vocal — in a good way. She’s the one patting people on the back when things are going well. She’s the one clapping her hands and trying to keep everyone pumped up when they’re not.

High school volleyball at its best is a power game with quick, pure points. “Bump, set, spike,” is how Rogers likes to phrase it.

That was Carson volleyball in the glory days when the Cougars made it to the 3A state championship game in back-to-back years early in Rogers’ tenure. That’s also the way they did it at West Rowan just a few years ago when coach Jan Dowling had Tori Hester and KK Dowling flying around the ceiling.

For the 2024 Hornets, points are frequently extended and end as often with a mistake as with a devastating kill. Yang and Morris, who is closing in on 1,000 kills, are exceptions, but the Hornets don’t normally have club players. Usually, they have athletes who found the sport relatively late. The Hornets  rely more on hustle and effort than on precision, but they had some pretty fair teams for coach Michelle Davis, who stepped down prior to this season. leaving Harris with an experienced senior core.

The Hornets are 6-5 overall this season, but they are 6-1 and contenders in the 1A/2A Central Carolina Conference.

“We don’t have as many year-round volleyball players as most of the Rowan schools do,” Yang said. “But the team we have this year is more experienced than we normally are because we have so many seniors. We’ve got a chance to do something in our conference and in the playoffs.”

The playoffs are a realistic goal. The Hornets are on the bubble for that.

Salisbury played a competitive match (and won a set) against South Rowan to start this season. That was a confidence-builder, but the Hornets don’t normally play Rowan squads other than league opponent North Rowan.

“The most fun games for me, personally, are the games where we have to play up,” Yang said. “West Davidson games have been the most fun for me over the years and are the games I look forward to the most because they’re the team to beat in our league. They’ve got a lot of club players. But if we’re on, we can play with them.”

Salisbury lost its meeting in August with West Davidson, but will play the Green Dragons against next Tuesday.