Catalina’s 2011 team wanted to be viewed as the best team in Tucson history. It then delivered, winning a second straight state championship.
Unlike so many other high school sports in Arizona, state volleyball championship games aren’t staged in NBA arenas, 60,000-seat football stadiums, spring training baseball facilities or historic softball venues like Hillenbrand Stadium.
In May of 2010, Catalina High School coach Heather Moore-Martin was informed her boys volleyball team would play 2006, 2007 and 2008 state title dynamo Catalina Foothills in the gymnasium at Pueblo High School.
They made the best of it.
About 1,000 of the Trojans, who had won 42 consecutive matches leading to the state championship game, filled the south side of the bleachers. Catalina didn’t disappoint, winning its first state championship in any boys sport since the tennis team won it all in 1989.
After the match, celebrating with his teammates on the Pueblo court, Catalina junior Ryan Graham told me: “It’s a fairy tale. We should be even better next year.”
Almost out of nowhere, Moore-Martin, hired to start a boys volleyball program in 1998, had built Catalina into a state powerhouse. Her 2010 state champs went 21-0 against Southern Arizona opponents with just one contributing senior, Oybeq Kholiqov.
Foothills coach David Thistle, owner of three state championships, was impressed. “If you watch Catalina,” he said, “they don’t make a mistake.”
At the start of the 2011 season, Moore-Martin didn’t temper her expectations.
“We want to be the best team Tucson has ever seen,” she said. “We’re aiming to play volleyball in a way Southern Arizona has never seen before. The senior leadership on this team is unparalleled.”
Bingo.
The Trojans went 29-0 against Arizona teams (it lost twice to California teams in a midseason tournament) and won it all again, this time with an exclamation mark. This time the venue changed — from Pueblo to the gym at Amphi — but the results were the same.
The senior-laden team led by all-city performers Josh DeYoung, Cooper Kowalski, Lorenzo Gonzales and Marcellius Gibbs were rarely challenged.
“We wanted to leave a mark in Tucson volleyball and I feel like we’ve really done that,” said Moore-Martin, who played on Catalina’s 1983 girls state championship team and later coached at Green Fields Country Day School and as an assistant at Pima College. “We dominated all season.”
Most of the ’11 Trojans had played volleyball together since middle school; after they graduated, the only Tucson school to win a boys volleyball title is Cienega (2017, 2022). But what makes the ’10 and ’11 Trojan champs so memorable is that they overcame a declining enrollment. the lack of tradition and participation numbers to become champions at a non-traditional sports school.
Moore-Martin attracted immediate attention. She not only coached the Catalina boys to back-to-back state championships, she also coached the girls team to the 2011 state finals.
She was in demand. After the 2013 season, Moore-Martin was hired to be the girls volleyball coach at Salpointe Catholic. At the time, no Tucson school had won a girls state volleyball championship since the days of Rincon’s Juanita Kingston (1993) and Flowing Wells’ Ed Nymeyer (1991)
Moore-Martin soon proved that her days at Catalina were no fluke.
She has coached Salpointe to state championships in 2016, 2017 and 2020, as well as coaching the Lancers’ beach volleyball team to 2021 and 2022 state titles. That gives her seven overall, putting her in a class with her mentor, Catalina coach Mary Hines, who is often viewed as the leading volleyball coach in Tucson history, any level, any gender.
Moore-Martin is the only girls volleyball coach in Tucson to win a state title in the last 29 years. But it was her work with the Catalina boys teams of 2010 and 2011 that remains groundbreaking and memorable.
