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Mount Olive’s Connor Adams Completes Successful Senior Year for Division III Volleyball

Aug 15, 2022 04:01PM ● By Steve Sears

Connor Adams (center) and his teammates with their semifinal trophy (courtesy of Wentworth Institute of Technology Athletics)

Connor Adams recalls his last walk off the court as a Wentworth Institute of Technology volleyball player.

“As I walked off the court, I thought, ‘Man, it's over’ with a little chuckle,” Adams recalls. “We did so much this year, and it was really my only chance as a starter. At least in my own head, I'd been saying, ‘Once I'm in there, we're going to  start winning. Once I'm playing, we're going to win.’ And for it to happen, to be able to go that far, receive the accolades and the things that we did – I was just so happy.”

#9 Connor Adams (courtesy of Wentworth Institute of Technology Athletics)

 Adams, a setter, had a superb senior volleyball season for the 30 win and 5 loss Wentworth Leopards of Boston, Massachusetts. He had a total of 869 assists, 44 service aces, 120 digs, 43 blocks, and he averaged 9.45 assists per set. He was named First-Team Great Northeast Athletic Conference (which the Leopards won with a 15 – 1 record) and First-Team All-GNAC Tournament team. He also garnered First-Team All-American and First-Team All-Region honors for the American Volleyball Coaches Association. Also named Player of the Week during the season, he and his teammates led Wentworth to the Final Four out of 107 Division III teams, where they eventually fell short to the repeat champions, the #2 ranked Carthage College Firebirds.

“Our goal was to just get as far as we could,” Adams says of the Leopards 2022 season. “We wanted to win our conference because that hadn't really been done while the senior core group was there. While we kind of were developing and sitting on the bench, watching the team play above us, they were a great group of guys that built us into the players we were. When we were given the chance to be out there on the court, it was really cool to win. and we did, and then we just kept winning, won two more games, and then ran into the eventual national champions and lost.”

During his 2021 junior season, Adams and Hunter Oshman, another All-American and another New Jersey (Pennington) guy, were unable to play due to injury. However, when 2022 arrived, that duo, combined with Jacob LaBouliere, an opposite hitter and another First-Team All-American, two experienced middle hitters in David Marsh and Colin Stockton, and returning senior libero, Phoenix Stebbins, the Leopards had a good core group who wanted to win and had the talent to do so.

Adams originally grew up playing hockey, but a concussion changed everything. His dad had played volleyball, and his sister Tristan had played rec volleyball. He eventually took up the game. “I was a pretty athletic kid growing up,” Adams says. “I loved to play sports. I just started playing volleyball in the backyard with my dad and my sister, and eventually played recreation volleyball the next year. And then after the first year of rec, I think we kind of realized that I took it a little too seriously, and I was definitely one of the more skilled players there. It was definitely a good start. It introduced me to volleyball, and then I ended up playing for a club in Fairfield.” He played with that club until February, and then joined another club that played until July. “That (second) team was a pretty high caliber level team, competing for bids to the nationals. My first year there I was 16, and I got brought in for a tournament, and we got a bid to open nationals, which put us with the 30 other best teams in the country.” That experience opened the door for him in terms of college recruiting. “That made me realize I could probably play in college, and with my college search I knew I wanted to do computer science. I'd been pretty set on that for a couple of years at that point. I ended up finding Wentworth, and the coach, Evin Giglio, is a real nice guy who recruited me here.”

What also swayed him was the Leopard club prior to his arrival earned a trip to the Division III NCAA Final Four. Their next trip to a championship round would be with Adams in 2022.

In the NCAA Tournament, Wentworth traveled to Rutgers Newark to face Saint John Fisher College of Rochester, New York, who in the first round they defeated in a tough match. Next up was the host team. “That was fun for me – I knew a lot of the guys on that team,” Adams says. “More than half the team, I played club with growing up.” It was another win for the Leopards, and earned them a Final Four matchup with Carthage on the opponent’s home floor. Carthage prevailed. “That was the only game this year we got swept,” Adams says. Wentworth was awarded a semifinal trophy.

Adams, who will graduate school next year and will soon be starting a job at Verisk, a data analytics business firm in Boston, is satisfied where his school’s volleyball program is, and where it is heading. And maybe another Final Four run helped…again.  “I think it's kind of cool that I ended my career getting to the Final Four, and we have a pretty big recruiting class coming in,” he says. “They have a lot of good guys coming in, and I like to think that I helped get those guys here.”