Unless you count singular-gender sports like football, baseball or softball, there is probably no high school sport with a greater disparity of serious players — i.e., collegiate prospects — than that between boys’ and girls’ volleyball.
While the vast majority of San Mateo County high school boys’ volleyballers are hobby players, Aragon senior Jonathan Garcia-Rovetta showed what can be achieved in a short stretch of time with the decision to take one’s game seriously.
Garcia-Rovetta started playing club volleyball just two summers ago, and even with that didn’t join up with a hyper-competitive club until he and Aragon teammate Theo Hargis moved to Academy Volleyball Club out of Redwood City last summer, prior to his senior year.
The difference between Garcia-Rovetta’s junior and senior seasons was evident not only in his individual play, but with that of the Aragon varsity squad.
“We just really came together as a team,” Garcia-Rovetta said. “This was the first time our starting six had really played together the previous year. And Theo and I had both played club at Academy, so that’s good right there … and everybody else just stepped up. I think the sense that we wanted [to win], everybody just stepped up and it was just a great team.”
With the 6-4 senior manning the outside hitter position, the Dons went from a middling team in 2016 to a co-Peninsula Athletic League Bay Division championship in 2017, the program’s first ever league title, posting a 24-5 overall record and matching fellow co-champ Menlo-Atherton’s league record at 13-1.
“He was a huge part of that,” Aragon head coach Diean Hala’ufia said. “This year especially, he’s worked really hard during the club season. This year he was a different kind of player. Just a dominant go-to player that we went to often, as our record shows.”
Garcia-Rovetta was a team captain, the Dons’ scoring leader — averaging approximately 17 to 18 kills per match, according Hala’ufia — and the unequivocal team leader, for which he has been named Daily Journal Boys’ Volleyball Player of the Year.
With the PAL joining the Central Coast Section as an official sport in 2016, and originating with unofficial status as a tournament team in 2014, Garcia-Rovetta was present for the inception of Aragon boys’ volleyball.
“He has been there from the beginning and has grown into such a good player,” Hala’ufia said.
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He started as a two-sport athlete, playing both water polo and volleyball as a freshman. While volleyball started out as his secondary sport, it only took one season for him to drop water polo altogether and spend the next three exclusively as a volleyballer.
“I thought I was going to focus on water polo for my three years, but my freshman (volleyball) year was just really fun,” Garcia-Rovetta said. “So I decided I liked volleyball so much more, I decided I was going to get as good as I could, and help get the team as good as we could be.”
The Dons were led by someone in Hala’ufia who knows a thing or two about putting a team on the map. A former basketball and volleyball player at Aragon, she has a place in Aragon history, having played for the first girls’ hoops team in program history to reach the Central Coast Section playoffs, which the team did in 1979-80, four years after the CCS girls’ basketball bracket debuted.
Now an Aragon sports hall of famer — along with former Dons’ teammate Cynthia Moore — Hala’ufia has her Dons’ team raring for a similar timetable in reaching the CCS playoffs; four years after joining the section makes for a target of 2019. Aragon could have very well been the PAL Bay Division’s lone CCS qualifier this year, but was betrayed by the third-tier tiebreaker rule that favored M-A.
The first tier of the tiebreaker format was heads-up play; Aragon and M-A split a two-game season series. The second tier was number of total sets won; each of the teams’ heads-up matches were settled in four sets, making that a push as well. The third tier of the tiebreaker format was total points allowed against one another; M-A scored a total of 161 points in the two matches to Aragon’s 154.
If only the two teams could have settled the tie with a third season match.
“That would have been really nice,” Garcia-Rovetta said. “They were a really good team. So I’m not upset to losing to them.”
Garcia-Rovetta bypassed playing collegiately for the opportunity to attend UCLA academically. So, while he is still considering playing intramural volleyball there, he is intent on not attempting to try out as a walk-on with the Bruins, despite the urging from Hala’ufia to do so.
Helping to put the Dons on the map, though, was more than he ever dreamed when he walked into the Aragon gym as a freshman with just two years of casual volleyball playing experience. And — after a successful club season last summer in which Academy won the third-tier bronze bracket title at junior nationals, equating to approximately 25th overall in the nation — defeating powerhouse M-A on March 15 — was the pinnacle of his four-year varsity career.
“That was probably one of the highlights of my volleyball career,” Garcia-Rovetta said.
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