By John Frierson
Staff Writer

Tori Harper remembers her final moment between the lines of a volleyball court last season. Unfortunately for her and Georgia, it came at the end of the Bulldogs’ season opener.

In the fifth set of the Bulldogs’ match against UC Santa Barbara, on the first day of the Seminole Invitational in Tallahassee, Fla., Harper landed on a teammate’s foot, breaking her fibula and suffering a high ankle sprain. Her eight kills and three blocks in that match wound up being her only stats of the season.

“Crazy,” the middle blocker said. “Honestly, I just leaned on my teammates after that. It wasn’t about me anymore, it was what I could do for them.”

A redshirt junior, Harper was on the 2024 SEC Volleyball Community Service Team, and she has been nominated for the inaugural Allstate NACDA Fall Good Works Team. She is also a strong advocate for looking after your mental health, so her team-first attitude after a season-ending injury was no surprise.

“Tori was killing it that first weekend, and then just like that, she was out. That really hurt. She was playing at her peak, and we’re really glad to have her back this year,” head coach Tom Black said. “She’s got a lot of experience, she’s a leader — she brings value in every way.”

As it turned out, Harper wound up with a lot of company on the Georgia sideline during a rough, injury-filled 12-14 season. One of last season’s freshmen, middle blocker/opposite MK Patten, missed the first 13 matches with a broken finger that required surgery. She would up playing in 50 of Georgia’s 110 sets in 2024. Only six players played in 100 or more sets last season, including 2023 SEC Player of the Year Sophie Fischer, and only two of those, middle blocker Ceci Gooch (106) and Bianna Muoneke (100), are back.

“We had six people out at one time,” Black said. The roster was so depleted that Georgia had multiple players forced into playing out of position just to put a team on the floor. “It was like a high school; I was going back to my club days to find the rotation.”

Asked if there is a silver lining to going through all that, for him or the team, Black struggled to find one.

“No. It’s just no,” he said with a laugh. “Maybe your character grows and there are benefits down the road that I can’t see, but you don’t want that happening — absolutely not.”

Muoneke, Georgia’s top returning offensive weapon with 295 kills last season, said the best takeaways from last season were “team unity” and the constant reminder that every chance to play needs to be appreciated.

“Coming into this year, every minute that we have on the court, we’re not taking for granted,” the junior outside hitter said. “It feels really good to be out there with the team. We’re celebrating the big things and the little things, and it just feels really good to have everyone out on the court.”

Georgia hosts an exhibition against Georgia State on Saturday (3 p.m.) at Stegeman Coliseum, and then opens its season next weekend with matches against Samford and Troy at the Samford Invitational. Harper can’t wait.

“I am literally counting down the days,” she said. “I’m so excited.”

Black and the Bulldogs are eager to see how this team comes together once the games begin. Losing Fischer, a superstar on the court and in the locker room, is tough, but Georgia is confident that it can fill that void in multiple ways. There are five talented freshmen, there are a few transfers, and then there are returners like Harper and Kendal Kemp.

While Harper was out all season with her injury, the 6-foot-6 Kemp, a redshirt junior middle blocker, was perfectly healthy but had to redshirt after transferring from Auburn. She led the Tigers in blocks in her two seasons on the Plains, while also ranking among the top five in the SEC in total blocks and blocks per set.

“You don’t replace a player like Sophie, but I’m really excited to see what Kendal can do after redshirting last year,” Black said. “We had a lot of really good players on the team last year that didn’t get a full look because so many of them were out. It’s kind of hard to evaluate how good that team was because they were hardly ever on the floor together.”

As the injuries piled up and the season went awry, Georgia spent last season having to celebrate the little things. This season, the Bulldogs want to keep recognizing and celebrating those little things, because every opportunity to play is still precious, but they also want to be healthy, happy, and get back to winning and playing their best volleyball.

“There’s so much new talent that we have, and we’ve all grown so much over the offseason,” Harper said. “We’ve become so strong and so unified, and I’m just excited. We’re excited to show everybody what we are and what we can do.”

They will get their chance soon enough. And for some of them, like Harper and Kemp, it has been a really long wait.

 

Assistant Sports Communications Director John Frierson is the staff writer for the UGA Athletic Association and curator of the ITA Men’s Tennis Hall of Fame. You can find his work at: Frierson Files.