By Derek Thompson | The Selma Times-Journal

April Harper said she doesn’t advertise her volleyball coaching services outside of her team at Wallace Community College Selma, but since the summer started she has shown over 60 high school players from Dallas County High School and Morgan Academy some new skills.

Harper’s most recent camp was held Tuesday through Thursday as she hosted Morgan Academy’s varsity volleyball team at WCCS.

Most of her camps this summer have had a mixture of advanced and inexperienced players so she kept the practices basic and stuck to teaching them the fundamentals only.

This week Harper got into more technique and taught advanced skills to Morgan Academy’s players because they were all varsity.

“With every camp I always do the basic fundamentals, which is hitting, setting, spiking, passing and things of that nature,” Harper said. “Once they’ve mastered that the rest will come.”

Harper taught the Senators rotation and perimeter offenses and defenses, how to place their serves, how to work the seam of the net and how to exploit the other teams’ weaknesses using target serving.

“Their knowledge of the game is better, and they know proper terminology,” Harper said. “The defense is better because they know where to go. I’ve gone over two types of defenses with them that will hopefully help them for their upcoming season.”

Morgan Academy head coach Caroline Averitt said she has seen significant improvement from her players since they started Harper’s camp.

“We’ve gotten more here in three days than anywhere else,” Averitt said. “It’s not a single skill camp. We’ve worked on some footwork and learned some new drills. We’re really trying to nail down some footwork and position play.”

Harper’s enthusiasm for the sport is one of the main reasons why the Senators have soaked up as much knowledge as they have at the three-day camp, Averitt said.

“She doesn’t just tell you how to do it, she will show you how to do it and she does it well,” Averitt said. “She has a very demanding nature, and a very commanding nature. (My players) want to please her as much as they want to please me now. My girls have responded very well to her. She’s so enthusiastic that is it just contagious. I want them to take what they have learned here and carry it over into open gym where they can work on the skills that she’s tried to perfect. We cannot start official practice until mid-July, but there is open gym. The girls can go in and work on whatever they want to.”