Sierra

Mater Dei and Sierra Canyon have been the two best high school girls’ volleyball teams in the Southland the last several years and the likelihood is high that they will meet in the Southern Section Division 1 finals for a third consecutive season.

Mater Dei won the state Open Division championship in November, led by four seniors now suiting up for NCAA Division I programs — setter Sam Capinpin at Cal State Bakersfield, libero Lizzy Robinson at Oregon and middle blocker Addison Coady and outside hitter Layli Ostovar (the 2025 Gatorade California player of the year) at USC.

The Monarchs won the Queen’s Court Invitational (the last preseason warmup tournament) in Irvine at the start of the month and boast one of their deepest rosters in coach Dan O’Dell’s 14 seasons thanks to five elite transfers: senior opposite hitter Katherine Nowak from JSerra; junior outside hitter/defensive specialist Sienna Cicero from Orange Lutheran; junior middle blocker Reagan Williams from Sunny Hills; junior outside hitter Janiah Burrage from Rancho Christian and senior middle hitter (and Long Beach State commit) Saaliyah Brown from Etiwanda, all of whom are eager to contribute once the mandatory sit-out period ends Sept. 13.

Sierra Canyon senior Kendall Omoruyi, right, is one of the top middle blockers in the country.

(Steve Galluzzo / For The Times)

In a matchup of reigning state champions, Mater Dei prevailed in five sets over Harvard-Westlake in its Aug. 11 season opener, and it was no surprise that UCLA-bound senior hitter Westley Matavao made her presence felt with 16 kills, 19 digs and six aces. California commit Emma Kingston added 13 kills and three blocks as setting duties were shared by senior Kalea Lee (24 assists) and junior Riley Stringer (20 assists).

“It’s great to start out playing a team that’s just as competitive as us — it’s good prep for what we can expect all season,” said Matavao, who recorded 405 kills, 177 digs, 37 aces and 32 blocks a year ago. “This teaches us to not be laid back, to keep our foot on the gas. I think we’re better than last season because we have more versatility.”

Making an immediate influence was freshman Jimin Seung, who ended the first point of the season with a kill and finished with 10. On a team with 11 seniors, Seung is fitting right in with a fearless attitude and competitive drive.

“It was nerve-racking, but knowing our team is one, the nervousness turns to confidence,” Seung said. “I came to Mater Dei because it’s the place that felt most like home and I wanted to grow in my religion. I’ve only known Westley a few weeks and she’s already like a big sister to me. She’s a senior and I’m a freshman, but we have a lot in common because we play the same position.”

Mater Dei coach Dan O’Dell guided the Monarchs to the CIF State Open Division championship in 2025.

(Steve Galluzzo / For The Times)

Though Mater Dei has superior depth, Sierra Canyon has a more experienced starting lineup — a nucleus of All-Americans consisting of Missouri-bound setter Lucky Fasavalu, Nebraska-bound middle Kendall Omoruyi and a trio of outside hitters in Eva Jeffries (Tennessee), Hanna McGinest (Texas Tech) and McKenna McIntosh (USC).

Filling the last rotation spot will be Isabella Torres-Wallace from ICL Academy; fellow sophomore middle Cassie Smith and junior Raneighla Gonzalez, who transferred from Heritage Christian last year but got hurt and played in only two sets. The top back row options for coach Stefanie Wigfall, who will likely pass the 400-win mark this season, are senior Olive Shum and Mira Costa transfer Blake Gurney.

Sierra Canyon, which beat Mater Dei to win its second section title in four years last fall, finished fifth at Queen’s Court without Fasavalu, Omoruyi and McGinest, who led the team a year ago with a combined 469 kills, 265 digs, 29 blocks and 28 aces. The Trailblazers beat Kahuku (Hawaii), Mira Costa, JSerra, San Juan Hills, Palos Verdes, Harvard-Westlake and Cornerstone Christian (San Antonio) to reach the finals of the Ann Kang Invitational in Honolulu. They then rallied past host Iolani, 18-25, 25-11, 15-9, in Saturday’s championship match to win the prestigious tournament for the first time.

Lucky Fasavalu helped lead Sierra Canyon to the Southern Section Division 1 title in 2025.

(Steve Galluzzo / For The Times)

Division I state champion Harvard-Westlake got 12 kills each from sophomore Brooke Cotter and Boston College-bound Ruby Sampson and 11 from Princeton commit Sophia Cotter against Mater Dei. Last year the Wolverines finished third in the Mission League behind Sierra Canyon and Marymount, which has lost five Division I players to graduation — Sammy Destler (Washington), Elle Vandeweghe (Southern Methodist), Declan Eastman (Rice), Olivia Penske (Georgetown) and Frankie Jones (Brown) — but brings back Northwestern commit Makenna Barnes, setter/hitter Leighton Devereux and Katelyn Oerlemans, a middle/opposite hitter committed to Stanford for beach volleyball.

Challenging Mater Dei in the Trinity League will be Santa Margarita, which won the Southern Section Division 2 title last year behind player of the year Ireland Real, a Texas commit who pounded more than 400 kills and had 150 digs.

Mira Costa will be led by senior captains Brynn Barry (libero), Lerin Rosenthal (setter, opposite) and Allyn Hilt (outside hitter) but will have to overcome the loss of setter Milly McGee (USC) and hitters Audrey Flanagan (Wisconsin) and Simone Roslon. Bay League rival Redondo Union is in a similar circumstance, having to replace hitter Abby Zimmerman (Cal), twins Avery and Addi Junk (Florida State) and middle blocker Taylor Boice (UC Irvine). Cypress graduated CIF-SS Division 3 player of the year Isabella Faro.

Defending champion Palisades and Taft, which lost to the Dolphins in the Open Division semifinals last fall, are the preseason favorites in the City Section.

Matavao relished a chance to face her cousin Fasavalu (the CIF-SS Division 1 player of the year) in the finals again: “I think there’s a good chance we’ll see them again.”

Teams to watch: Mater Dei, Sierra Canyon, Marymount, Harvard-Westlake, JSerra, Santa Margarita, San Juan Hills, Mira Costa, Redondo Union, Newport Harbor, Los Alamitos, Long Beach Poly, Temecula Valley, Crean Lutheran, West Ranch.

A bitter battle that exposed deep divisions over the direction of America’s conservation movement reached culmination with the announcement Wednesday that Sierra Club members had overwhelmingly rejected a campaign by immigration control advocates to control the venerable environmental group.

In what was termed the largest voter turnout in the Sierra Club’s 112-year history, more than 22% of the group’s 757,000 members cast ballots to select its governing board. The votes, which were submitted by members in March and April, were tallied Wednesday. The members elected a slate backed by the club’s leaders and which received more than 110,000 votes apiece.

By contrast, a slate of candidates seeking to bring a strong immigration control agenda to the club garnered only minimal support — former Colorado Gov. Richard Lamm, the best known, received 13,090 votes.

“I never argue with the voters. My congratulations to the winners,” Lamm said in an e-mail shortly after the results were announced. He declined to be interviewed.

Five seats were up for grabs on the club’s 15-member governing board. The election took place via mail and the Internet starting in March.

The election was the second time in less than a decade that the Sierra Club, arguably the nation’s most influential environmental group, has publicly wrestled with the issue of restricting immigration. Members voted to remain neutral on the issue in 1998, following a campaign that featured accusations that conservationists were resorting to immigrant bashing, and counterclaims that political correctness was leading to environmental cowardice. The same accusations were raised this year.

Despite the 1998 vote, an increasingly vocal group of environmentalists continued to argue that the Sierra Club needed to aggressively support strict immigration controls, citing the destructive effect of unchecked U.S. population growth on the nation’s natural resources.

Three prominent immigration control advocates — UCLA astronomy professor Ben Zuckerman, Wisconsin Secretary of State Doug LaFollette, and Paul Watson, leader of the group Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, already had won seats to the board in recent years, putting majority control within the grasp of the dissidents in this year’s election.

Sierra Club leaders said after the landslide vote that they hoped the rancorous dispute had finally been resolved.

“I thought the issue should have been laid to rest after 1998, and I certainly don’t see anything in these results to suggest [members] have had a change of heart,” said Sierra Club Executive Director Carl Pope.

“We are delighted that the turnout was so strong. This may have been the largest election turnout ever for a nonprofit organization other than the NRA,” the National Rifle Assn.

However, it quickly became clear on Wednesday that the losing side considered the issue far from resolved. Rather than seeing the results as evidence that Sierra Club members did not support an immigration platform, critics called it proof that dirty tactics by the status quo to promote their favorites had unfairly tipped the scales.

Some dissidents said they were holding out hope that a lawsuit filed recently in San Francisco Superior Court would result in a new election. The suit alleges that Sierra Club leaders violated state laws governing nonprofits by using club funds to promote candidates they had endorsed.

Club officials called the claims groundless. A similar suit by Lamm was withdrawn when Pope and other club officials threatened a countersuit.

“The Sierra Club just elected the best new directors money can buy — but with a lawsuit pending over unfair election practices, justice and truth may yet prevail,” said a losing candidate, Karyn Strickler.

Strickler, who said she did not advocate curbing immigration and was running as an independent reformer, said all candidates who collected petitions to be on the ballot were damaged by an “urgent election notice” to Sierra Club members that accompanied the ballot and warned of “outside groups” seeking to influence the club’s agenda. Under Sierra Club bylaws, some candidates are automatically placed on the ballot by current leaders; others can collect signatures to run.

The ballot notice referred to racist and anti-immigrant websites that had posted stories urging their visitors to vote for immigration-control candidates in the Sierra Club elections, and made similar links to animal rights groups and hemp proponents. As a result of the notice, critics argued that voters were pressured to stick with the candidates endorsed by the current leadership.

During the dawn of the modern environmental movement four decades ago, conservationists widely embraced the goal of global population control. Books such as “The Population Bomb” by Stanford professor Paul Ehrlich painted a dire portrait of a planet straining under man’s increasingly wide footprint.

Yet although many environmentalists still call for worldwide curbs on population, they are increasingly divided over the less-abstract issue of restricting the flood of newcomers to America. According to the U.S. census, the U.S. population, now more than 292 million, could surge by 50% over the next 50 years, largely because of immigrants and their children.

Former Wisconsin Democratic U.S. Sen. Gaylord Nelson, one of the founders of Earth Day, sided with immigration control advocates, supporting Cornell University professor David Pimentel.

The two had been active in the Carrying Capacity Network, a population control organization that advocates strict curbs on immigration.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the founder of Waterkeeper Alliance, lent his name to the election campaign to defeat Pimentel and the other insurgents. Actor Robert Redford and MoveOn.Org, the liberal activist network known for helping propel former Democratic presidential candidate Howard Dean to prominence, also opposed the anti-immigration candidates.

“I think the agenda of those looking to bring immigration to our organization was soundly defeated,” said Sierra Club President Larry Fahn. “We should now focus on reuniting the membership and getting back to our core mission: to protect the planet. And this year, we should focus on the mission most of us consider most important this year: defeating President Bush and his horrendous environmental policies.”

Yet Fahn conceded that anti-immigration candidates were unlikely to give up their fight.

“The debate will continue,” he said. “Many of them feel so passionate that they will continue agitating and never be pacified.”