‘Road warrior’ Burlingame volleyball moves into new home

All of Burlingame’s indoor sports have been playing off campus for the past two years. The volleyball team last played an official match on campus Oct. 25, 2022. Since then, the Panthers have played 64 consecutive road matches.

“Gosh, it’s been two years — two plus,” Burlingame head coach Hannah Korslund said. “So, it definitely felt really good to be at home again.”

The former Burlingame athletics complex was razed in July 2023. In 2022, the new facility was projected to cost $41 million as part of the Measure L bond passed in 2020.

“It’s a beautiful facility,” Korslund said. “We’re super grateful to the district and to the voters of San Mateo County to have such a nice facility. Yeah, it’s nice.”

Korslund has never coached a varsity game in the new gym. She was the frosh-soph head coach in 2022, and took over the “road warrior” Panthers in 2023. The team certainly never seemed road wary. With Korslund at the varsity helm, the team boasts a 48-14 overall record, capturing the Central Coast Section Division III championship in 2023, and sharing the Peninsula Athletic League Bay Division championship last season with Menlo-Atherton.

The Panthers will extend their road warrior motif through the first month of the season, however. While Burlingame has an on-campus facility in which to practice, the team is scheduled to play its first 10 matches of the 2025 season on the road, a proverbial safety net put in place in case construction on the new facility ran into the current school year.

Burlingame will play its first official home match in the new facility Tuesday, Oct. 7, at 6 p.m., against Sequoia. A ribbon cutting will be 3:30 p.m. Wednesday, Aug. 27, 1 Mangini Way.

“We always knew we’d miss two volleyball seasons,” Korslund said. “We didn’t know how long into this season we’d miss ... so getting to finish tryouts here was nice.”

Korslund has over 70 players in tryouts this week to compete for roster spots on the program’s three teams at the varsity, junior-varsity and freshman levels. That number is down from last year when the number at tryouts was well over 80, a drop-off Korslund said was due to flag football being officially adopted by the CCS this season. Both volleyball and flag football are girls’ sports that compete concurrently during the fall season.

“So, we’re a little lower (numbers wise),” Korslund said. “This year was a big year for flag football tryouts ... so I think they’re getting a huge surge, which we’re super excited for them.”

Burlingame’s new athletics complex has two gyms, a main gym on the first floor and an auxiliary gym on the second floor. The complex includes locker rooms, a weight room and an athletic training room, all of which were open and fully functional Wednesday for the first day of school. A row of windows along the west wall offers the gyms plenty of natural light.

Korslund said the Panthers are still in the process of deciding which side of the court to claim for the home side. Prior to the COVID pandemic, it was standard practice for high school volleyball teams to switch sides, and benches, after each set of play within a given match. Since the pandemic, however, CCS volleyball teams have continued to refrain from switching sides.

“Every referee I’ve talked to has said it’s only if one side has a clear competitive advantage,” Korslund said. “But as long as sides are equal in competitive ability, they don’t switch sides anymore.”

Competitive ability doesn’t seem to be an issue, as volleyballers spent their first three days on the new court diving and flopping about in equal measure. Korslund said the new court is overly slippery, but that’s to be expected with a newly resurfaced floor and is expected to normalize.

“It’s nice,” Korslund said. “It’s not dusty. There’s no trash in the gym. It’s beautiful. We can’t complain.”

On the court, Burlingame is reloading the left side with the graduation of outside hitter Ella Duong, the reigning PAL Bay Division Most Valuable Player, who is now on roster at Campbell University in Buies Creek in the heart of North Carolina.

Junior outside hitter Jordan Toomey returns to the Panthers, with sophomore Ilsa Carlson moving from opposite to outside hitter. Junior Sam Hollrah, a former outside hitter, is projected to anchor the defense at the libero position for the second straight year.