By Ryan Clark
NKyTribune reporter
Brooke Inyart has a goal: Someday, she will play for the best volleyball team in the nation. And that, she’ll tell you, will be the Kentucky Wildcats, the team that just won their first national championship this spring.
Right now, the 15-year-old from Union attends Notre Dame Academy and is a talented player in her own right, performing on elite teams in Northern Kentucky. But her love for the game — and for the Cats — is why she and her family had to come down to the Union Marketplace Kroger Tuesday night to meet members of the UK volleyball team, as well as Coach Craig Skinner, as the Wildcats kicked off a Trophy Tour Celebration across the state.
“I want to go to every single game,” Brooke said after meeting her idols. “Sometimes I’m playing, too, though — I almost missed the championship because I had to play in a game. Luckily, I got to see it.”
Brooke came with her mother, Lesley, and father, David, to meet Skinner, as well as newly minted champions Alli Stumler, Lauren Tharp and Cameron Scheitzach. Lesley made sure Coach Skinner knew who her daughter was. And Brooke told the players she wanted to be like them one day.
More than 100 fans came out (with about 15 waiting in a line before the Wildcats even arrived) to the Kroger Tuesday afternoon. It was just proof again of how much this team has won over the hearts of the Kentucky fanbase.
“It means so much to us,” Skinner said, in-between shaking hands and taking pictures. “We’ve heard from so many fans. People have written in to tell us how much this meant to them. They’ve sent us homemade gifts in the mail. I think we got a lot of new fans in the past few months.”
Skinner and the players set up a table near the entrance of the grocery store and placed their hardware — the actual NCAA Championship trophy — right next to them. They then signed autographs for more than an hour before leaving for Great American Ballpark to take part in a pregame ceremony at the Cincinnati Reds vs. San Diego Padres game.
DeAnn Davis, of Independence, celebrated her 56th birthday Monday — then spent the next day coming to Union to see the national champs.
“We would always go to the basketball games, but they started giving out tickets to volleyball too,” Davis said. “So, we went and just fell in love with it. I never knew how amazing the games and the team were. They were just so cool, so we became fans pretty quick.”
Many fans stopped to tell the coach and his players how much they needed a big victory from their team at that moment in time. It’s no secret the UK Athletics department underwent its share of tragedy over the past 18 months, with the deaths of multiple basketball players, an assistant football coach, a basketball assistant’s daughter and a popular golfer. Couple that with the entirety of the COVID-19 effect, and fans were starved for something to root for.
“We’ve heard that from a lot of fans — they just come up and say, ‘Thank you,’” said junior All-American outside hitter Alli Stumler. “To hear that really means a lot to all of us. It’s just really, really special.”
The second stop of the victory tour is Wednesday, June 30 at the Euclid Ave. Kroger location (704 Euclid Ave.) in Lexington. That stop will also take place from 4:30-5:30 p.m. with Coach Skinner and select players.
If the team can meet fans like this on every trip, it will truly be a special experience.
“We were always a basketball family,” David Inyart said. But now that his daughter aspires to play a different sport at UK, his perspective has changed a bit. “Now we’re a volleyball family.”
Follow along with the Wildcats on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram, and on the web at UKathletics.com.