Port St. Lucie's UpOnTop Volleyball Rises From One Set Won to No. 1 in Florida

Four years ago, Juan Delgado's first volleyball team in Port St. Lucie won exactly one set — not one match, not one tournament. One set, all season long.

The girls were six and seven years old, new to the game, new to each other, figuring out which side of the net was theirs. Delgado could have been discouraged. He wasn't. And neither were they.

"You cannot always give up; you have to keep trying hard," said Paige Harris, the team's right side hitter — a sentiment from a six-year-old that turned out to be a roadmap.

Today, the girls of UpOnTop Volleyball are the No. 1-ranked 11-and-under team in the state of Florida — one of only 69 teams competing at that level statewide. Last month, they won the ASICS Florida Volleyball Challenge, one of the premier junior tournaments in the world, and earned an invitation to the USAV Volleyball Championship Games in Minneapolis.

They had never left the state for a tournament before.

"We were all really excited because we've never been that far for a tournament," Fogleman said.

"It was happy and exciting because it was our first time going out of state for a tournament," Harris said.

Delgado, who has guided the program since those early stumbling days, describes the transformation with the plainspoken certainty of a coach who watched it build brick by brick.

"I'm working hard with the girls, and the next two years we started winning games and winning games," he said. This season, something shifted beyond wins and losses. "The girls made a click, and hey, that's it."

That click carried a Port St. Lucie youth volleyball program — built on six-year-olds who could barely bump a ball — to the top of a state that takes its volleyball seriously. The USAV Championship in Minneapolis will test them against the best junior clubs in the country, but if their trajectory holds, St. Lucie County should expect these girls back with hardware.

This article was generated with AI assistance using publicly available information. It was reviewed and approved by a human editor before publication. TC Sentinel uses AI writing tools in accordance with FTC guidelines.