WELLMAN

The story starts at the Kalona YMCA.

Dakota Mitchell, just a young girl in elementary school then, was playing in a recreational youth volleyball league at the Y.

Sherry Evans, a coach then and a coach now, noticed something immediately. What was it? Just it. Same as a baseball scout who says, “Um, can you do that again?”

Sherry told Dakota that day (and remember, this was a second-grader just 7 or 8 years old at the time): “Kid, you need to do something more than just Y ball.”

Dakota, who is now one of the state’s best liberos as a senior at Mid-Prairie High School playing for Sherry Evans and is an NCAA DI recruit headed for the University of North Texas, remembers that day with Sherry and her husband, Zeb, who is also a coach.

“They saw something in me,” Dakota says. “And they told my mom, ‘She’s gonna go places. You need to get her to play (club) volleyball.”

Oh, wait. The story actually begins before that.

It is the fifth of October in 2006. Sherry Evans is in the middle of her nurse’s shift at Mercy Iowa City. She is an OBG nurse who assists in the delivery and care of newborns. On this day, one of the babies born is Dakota Mitchell and Evans is on the medical team.

Everything goes perfectly.

Just a few years later, at that Kalona Y, Karen Mitchell, Dakota’s mom, approaches Sherry.

“You know you were my nurse.”

A nod. A smile. And a conversation.

“Karen, you have something special here,” Sherry says. “You need to get her in club.”

Soon, Dakota and bestie volleyball friend Jovi Evans, Sherry’s daughter, are kids riding in mom’s car to an Iowa Rockets game with the animated movie “Up” playing on the car’s video system. It became a little girl tradition.

Dakota laughs heartily at that memory now.

She remembers going to a Hy-Vee store after practice one day, where somebody asks if Dakota and Jovi are twins.

“I literally remember that,” Dakota says, laughing. “That’s so funny. That is hilarious.”

“We’d always ride up together,” Jovi Evans said of their Rockets trips. “We started the same year and we just kind of both fell in love with it. We just kept going together.”

Now, almost 10 years later, they have helped lead Mid-Prairie’s volleyball team to a second consecutive season of school-record wins. The Golden Hawks won 31 last year. They won their 33^rd last week when they defeated Wilton for a Class 3A Regional championship.

Dakota has become one of the top defensive players in the state, topping 2,000 digs in four high school years. She is a libero for her current club team, Iowa Adrenaline Volleyball Academy, and won a USA Volleyball junior girls national championship over the summer. She is headed to North Texas next fall as a libero.

Libero is her thing.

“Right from the beginning, she loved playing volleyball,” said her dad, Kelly, who coached her in softball from the age of 2. “She really liked having the different colored jersey right away. She just picked up on that right away. She loved playing the game.”

Go to a Mid-Prairie game, and it’s easy to find Dakota. She’s the one diving everywhere on the court. She will not let a volleyball hit the floor. She dives. She flips into a somersault. She’ll leap into the bench. Anything.

“She comes home pretty bruised,” Kelly Mitchell, her dad, said, laughing. “All her knees are wrecked after a long weekend.”

But that first game at Mid-Prairie four seasons ago? It was emotionally tough on a 14-year-old, even after making the varsity softball team as a starter as an eighth-grader.

“I cried before my first game,” Dakota said. “I was very nervous.”

The hype had arrived before her. Here’s this club player who is going to be the starting libero in a sport featuring players three years older and nearly a foot taller than her.

“Those seniors, they were so supportive,” Dakota said. “They knew, like, my background in volleyball. And they were so supportive of me playing at the time. Other schools might not have been supportive of that, but the (Mid-Prairie) girls, when I was a freshman those seniors were so supportive.”

In that first match, Mitchell delivered a match-high 12 digs and a match-high 4 aces. The Golden Hawks swept Keota. Any questions?

“They all believed in me, but just proving myself,” she said. “I was nervous.”

Mitchell wound up with 463 digs that first season, the most of any freshman in Class 3A.

She has become so good at this that other teams simply will not hit the ball in her direction. They avoid her. And still, she has 521 digs to rank fourth in the state.

“What makes me the most proud is that she strives to make everybody on the court around her better,” Karen Mitchell said. “She knows that she is the first touch and in order to make her setter better, she’s got to do her job.”

The setter? That’s Jovi Evans, a junior who is the only Iowa high school player, all classes, to have totaled more than 550 assists and 320 kills this season.

It’s an ironic twist that Jovi is a libero during club season with Iowa Adrenaline. When she isn’t dropping back for digs, then it’s her sister Jeorgia, whose 398 digs, like Dakota in 2021, rank her number one among 3A freshmen. Also on that row is senior Lanee Duwa, who has more than 1,000 digs in four years.

“It’s just more reliable, knowing that we have three liberos on the back row and we know that we can all do our jobs and do it well,” Jovi Evans said.

If Dakota cried before her first game, imagine what the last game will be like.

A former Nitro softballer, she is still considering one final season with Mid-Prairie’s softball team next summer, but beckoning is the Mean Green of North Texas. The university is located in Denton, just north of Dallas. It’s a 12-hour trip.

“The only thing that I’m kind of nervous about, it’s gonna be different,” Mitchell said. “Like right away. It’s the same thing as going from middle school to high school.”

And that turned out pretty good.

“I’m hoping when I go down this summer, I’ll ease into it,” she said. “But I’m ready for the competitive atmosphere in that gym. My coaches are great. I literally love them. It’ll be really good.”

The story, which began at Mercy Iowa City with a volleyball coach, and then continued at the Kalona Y and Mid-Prairie, is simply changing venues.

Soon, deep in the heart of Texas.

News columnist Paul Bowker can be reached at bowkerpaul1@gmail.com. Follow him on Twitter: @bowkerpaul