When Maci Jones and her family moved from Texas to the area in 2020, volleyball wasn’t part of the plan. She had grown up in competitive cheer and had never played the sport.
Six years later, the South Walton senior outside hitter is committed to Southern Miss, and she spent this fall working her way back from an injury that cost her a month of her final high school season.
“I think it was meant to be,” Jones said. “If I hadn’t have moved here, I don’t really know if volleyball would have fallen into my lap the way it did. Moving here has genuinely given me the most opportunities to excel even past high school.”
A month on the sidelines
The Lady Seahawks opened the season with a sweep of Niceville, a start head coach Meaghan Allen called probably the strongest her team has come out of the gates. One match later, Jones went down.
The 6-foot senior suffered a grade 3 ankle sprain in late August when she landed on an opposing player underneath the net. Jones was out for about a month while she rebuilt the strength in her ankle.
“Being senior year, not ideal, and definitely was very frustrating for me,” Jones said. “But thankfully, I just focused on letting my team figure out who they are and what they can do without me and watching them thrive and have so much fun, even though I couldn’t be on the court with them.”
Allen said losing Jones was hard on the team.
- “She’s a big force, not just in our school. She’s, across the Panhandle, one of the best players here,” Allen said. “She’s a D1 commit. She just brings this presence that you just can’t replace. She’s not a kid that you can just look down the bench and find someone that can replace her.”
Jones said watching from the bench taught her things she couldn’t learn on the court.
“When you’re off the court, you really get to watch all the details and see how things move, and it really develops you as a player,” she said. “So I think ultimately, although I would’ve rather not gotten hurt, I think it helped me in the end.”
Allen said she had never seen an athlete as dedicated to getting back. Jones came to every practice, did her physical therapy on the sideline and kept lifting with the team’s trainer almost daily.
“She never made anyone think that she wasn’t going to be back before the end of the season,” Allen said. “She did everything that she needed to do to get back. She got back, I think, a little bit quicker than the doctors had initially said that she was gonna come back.”
While she was out, Jones kept giving feedback to the players who stepped into her role, including seniors Sydney Downing and Corinne O’Connell.
- “I couldn’t have been prouder of them,” Jones said. “They both really stepped up and became such vocal leaders without me on the court.”
Back with a hunger
Jones returned in mid-September at a tournament at Arnold, where South Walton fell to Florida High in the final. Allen said Jones was a little hesitant to jump at the net in her first matches back, since that was how she got hurt. By early October, around senior night, Jones said she was fully back.
Then she took off. Jones put up 24 kills against Arnold on Oct. 6 and 19 against Freeport on Oct. 16, according to MaxPreps. On Saturday, she finished with 14 kills, 14 digs and two aces in a 3-1 win over Florida High, the team that beat South Walton in September.
“It definitely was a little bit on the revenge side,” Jones said. “At some points we were down, but we never stopped fighting. We tried to out-hustle them and just bring as much energy and play South Walton volleyball, which has been our motto this entire season.”
Allen saw the difference.
- “She was just a different player,” Allen said. “You could see in her eyes, her body language, the way that she was communicating with her teammates. I think it has made her hungrier.”
Through Saturday, Jones had 178 kills, 146 digs and 17 aces on the season, per MaxPreps. Her .260 hitting percentage ranks third in Class 3A District 1.
She credited the numbers to her training and her setters, but mostly to having fun and playing smarter.
“A big mentality for me is I just try to swing through everything, block or no block. I just wanna kill the ball every time,” Jones said. “So using that, but in a strategic way. So knowing that if I’ve swung away at five balls, I probably should roll shot the next one, or tip the next one to throw ’em off a little bit.”
She takes the same pride in the passing side of the game.
“The first ball is the one that matters the most, so a good dig, a good serve receive ball, a good pass in general sets up a lot of the game,” she said. “That way, everyone has the opportunity to shine.”
From cheer to volleyball
Jones said she had always wanted to try volleyball, but competitive cheer and its travel schedule took up too much of her time. When the family moved and she didn’t find a cheer gym she loved, she decided to give it a shot.
“It kind of was just on the whim, ‘I wanna try this and see if I like it,’ and hasn’t let up since,” she said.
She believes cheer still shows up in her game.
“There was a team of 20 other people on the mat with you,” she said. “You couldn’t really think about yourself, and you couldn’t focus on the mistake you just made because you still had a whole other routine to do, and I definitely think that has carried over into my volleyball game.”
Jones is one of four children. Her two older siblings live in Dallas, and her younger sister has just started playing volleyball. Her father is a business owner whose ventures include the Big Bass Tour fishing league, and her mother is a stay-at-home mom.
Away from the court, Jones is involved in student government, National Honor Society and Key Club, and she has played on South Walton’s beach volleyball team. Her favorite subjects are English and math. When she gets free time, she heads to the beach with friends or to the gym for workouts, Pilates and yoga.
At Southern Miss, she plans to study sports management or sports psychology, an interest that grew out of noticing the mental side of her own game. She said a last-minute camp visit caught her attention, and her official visit sealed it.
- “It felt like home,” Jones said. “I didn’t have to try when I was talking to the coaches. They really understood my personality, my wants.”
‘Steady Eddy’
Allen, who took over the program in 2019, has coached Jones since she was 12, first on one of her club program’s regional teams.
“She was always a bit long and trying to figure out how her limbs worked, but she just kept growing and kept growing,” Allen said. “We’re all a bit blown away, honestly, at how fast she grew physically. But even more, her development just happened so fast.”
As a middle schooler, Jones helped Allen with line judging and other tasks just to be around the program. Allen put her on varsity as a freshman.
“She just had that killer instinct, and she had good size, but she just was one of those kids that showed up and worked hard every single day,” Allen said. “She just doesn’t have an off day.”
Allen described her as a high-character player who teammates look to, good times or bad.
- “She’s Steady Eddy,” Allen said. “She’s just consistent as a person, she’s consistent as a teammate. On the court, she’s consistent. And so then they know that they can depend on her in all facets.”
That is what Allen expects Southern Miss to get.
“She doesn’t really get super rattled. She shows up, she works hard,” Allen said. “She never shies down to a challenge. I think that they’re getting an absolute gem of a player and human being.”
Jones credits her parents, grandparents and siblings, along with Allen and her trainer, Rachel, for getting her here.
“It really has taken a village,” she said.
As her high school career wraps up, she said she couldn’t imagine having played anywhere else.
“I couldn’t have ever imagined playing for a different school. This school has really shaped me into the woman and the athlete and the person I’m gonna become,” Jones said. “I can’t wait to see what my sister gets to experience through those four years, and I hope she knows the pride and the culture that bleeds throughout the school and the program is just something so special.”
