Jessica Olang and her sister, Lindsay, fondly remember growing up with the Emmaus girls volleyball program when their mother, Susan Arndt, was the Green Hornets head coach for nine seasons from 1991-99.
“Back then, we were at Eyer Middle School a lot of the time, and I remember my mom yelling at me to get off the court,” Lindsay Olang said. “I would get hit in the head with a lot of volleyballs. But you know what, it was a lot of fun. I wouldn’t exchange my childhood for anything. I love this community and being around this environment. For us to be back here has been amazing … it has come full circle.”
And that circle now includes a league championship.
Thirty years after Arndt’s 1995 Emmaus team won the program’s first and only District 11 championship, Arndt and her two daughters were on the coaching staff that led the Green Hornets to their first and only league championship.
With a thrilling 23-25, 24-26, 25-23, 25-22, 15-13 come-from-behind win over Bethlehem Catholic on Oct. 16 at Liberty, Emmaus became Eastern Pennsylvania Conference champs for the first time.
The team followed it up by reaching the District 11 6A championship match, where it lost to Parkland in four sets, but the Green Hornets rebounded to beat District 2 champ Delaware Valley in the first round of the state tournament.
While the Hornets fell to Spring-Ford in the PIAA quarterfinals, their memorable 21-5 season made Jessica Olang The Morning Call’s girls volleyball coach of the year; an honor she happily shares with her coaching staff, which includes her mother, her sister, and close friends Emily Elek and Kelsey Nilsen.
Olang and the staff, affectionately called the Fab 5 by Elek, took Emmaus to great heights in just their second season together.
Making their league title all the more unexpected was that the team lost two of its best players — Maleya Hinds and Andraya Flowers — to season-ending injuries before the playoffs began.
But Olang and the assistants preached a “next girl up” philosophy, made some lineup adjustments, and kept the team motivated through a 14-2 EPC regular season.
“Going back to our open gyms last winter, we talked about our outcomes coming from the work we’re putting in now,” Jessica Olang, a 2003 Catasauqua High graduate, said. “If you want good outcomes, you’ve got to put the work in now. We don’t want to be three, four, or five months from now wishing we had done more. So we kept instilling in them that the process is important. Every touch on the ball matters; everything we do in the gym matters. The outcomes will come from what we do in the gym, and we never talked about becoming league or district champs. We just talked about what we need to do in the gym today to get ourselves prepared to be the best we can be, and the results will come. In that insane moment when we became a league champ, and to see the culmination of everything we’ve worked for over two years was just amazing. There may never be another moment like that again.”
Olang said even before the championship match against an undefeated Bethlehem Catholic team, the focus wasn’t on becoming a champion.
“It wasn’t on my radar,” she said. “I wasn’t thinking ‘tonight, we’re bringing home the first EPC championship in school history.’ We emphasized to the girls that they get to go play volleyball today. That’s a great day. Go out and work hard and have fun, and stay together. Bring everything you can and let the chips fall where they may.”
The chips weren’t falling Emmaus’ way early as the Green Hornets got behind two sets to none.
“The third set was really close, and there were like 19 ties, and you got the sense it could go either way,” Olang said. “It was at the end of the third set that Claudia Walls and Rosie Landino had incredible three-stuffed blocks in a row, and that shifted the tide. That’s what’s so fun, it’s a momentum sport. You get a couple of great plays like that, and everything can shift.”
Olang was a talented player in her own high school days.
At Catasauqua, where her mother began the program, she was a four-year varsity setter and a three-year captain. She was named first-team all-District 11 three times and was a two-time all-state honorable mention selection.
She then went on to play for Roberts Wesleyan College near Rochester, New York, where she was a four-year starting setter and an all-conference player. After college, she coached at Dieruff, where she eventually became head coach before marrying and moving to upstate New York, where she and her husband began a family and a business.
But she came back to the Lehigh Valley and settled in Emmaus, where she has four children, ranging in ages from 13 to 6.
“Even when we lived in upstate New York, I was still coaching volleyball with my mom, assisting at Velocity, and Crosscourt, just trying to keep my toes in the water as much as I could,” Olang said. “But when you’re raising a family, you have to step back from leading. When we came back to the area, it was just like the right timing for me to get more involved in coaching again. This position opened, and it was the perfect storm of being ready for it. I am so appreciative of this opportunity, and to have the coaching staff I have is unbelievable. You can have a vision, but if people aren’t there to share that vision, it’s very hard to move that vision along.”
Olang said that the staff is remarkably united.
“We’re of one mind, one focus, one vision, one mentality,” she said. “We’re determined to take this program where we want it to go.”
Arndt, who has had success wherever she has been over the last 35 years in volleyball, is proud of her daughter and says, “She makes sure to keep me in line.”
She was a member of Parkland’s football staff for a few years, working directly as an interpreter with player Alex Ocasio, who was deaf.
“Coach [Tim] Moncman runs a well-oiled ship, just as we pride ourselves on being here,” Arndt said. “He made me realize that while there are a lot of moving parts, it all comes together as a whole. There are a lot of coaches on a football staff, but it comes down to where we all fit in, where do the puzzle pieces connect. I won a coach of the year award as a boys coach at Northampton, but I am so much happier for Jess. You never want the spotlight to shine on yourself. That’s how she is. You want to give back to others … the other coaches and the kids. This puts a stamp on who she is and what she has created, and what the kids have created.”
Elek, who graduated from Emmaus in 2009 and played Division I college volleyball at Canisius, said, “Being an Emmaus alum, it was an especially awesome season. The girls were super great. It was also so exciting. The past two years we’ve been here, we’ve done a lot with the girls, and we let them know that it’s OK to make mistakes. You just have to learn from them. As a coaching staff, we all do different things, but it all comes together as a well-oiled machine.”
Emmaus will graduate two first-team all-EPC selections in Amanda Rivera and Alyssa Heffner, but has several outstanding players returning.
“Our seniors were phenomenal this year, but I look ahead to what will still be here and what’s coming up, and we’re as excited as we’ve ever been,” Olang said. “We’ve got Fiona Answini back as an outside hitter and Emma Nesfeder back who ended up playing middle for us this year when she’s actually a setter. We’ve got great seniors coming up. The talent pool remains strong and we’re excited to see what they can accomplish.”
