Renee Saunders Earns 500th Win with Skutt Catholic Volleyball as SkyHawks Sweep Lincoln Pius X

With a 3-0 win over Class B No. 5 Lincoln Pius X on Tuesday, Renee Saunders earned her 500th win as head coach of Skutt Catholic volleyball.

The third-ranked SkyHawks swept the Thunderbolts 23-18, 23-13, 27-25 at home to push Saunders past the milestone. The Nebraska volleyball alumna and long-time head coach doesn’t like to talk about herself, but her players are happy to do it for her.

“I think it’s really awesome,” senior Charlotte Kollars told NebPreps. “I’ve been watching her for a really long time. I’ve always wanted to be on this team, and to see her reach this after having such a long relationship with her is really cool.”

The win improved Saunders to 500-121 (.805) in her 16th season at Skutt. The SkyHawks have 15 state tournament appearances, nine state championships and two runner-up finishes under her guidance.

“I’ve never had a coach like her,” Kollars said. “I think it’s the way that she can connect with us, and she’s just really relatable and she is so understanding. She just has a way of talking to you that’s just like she says exactly what you need to hear.”

Saunders herself is quick to shift that credit to her players, and she’s had many spectacular ones — including the likes of Lindsay Krause (Nebraska), Morgan Burke (Michigan), Paisley Douglas (USC), Addison West (North Carolina) and many others — during her tenure. The common string tying them all together is the Skutt Catholic standard Saunders and her staff have established.

“I feel like it’s passed on from generation to generation,” Saunders said. “Obviously, the culture when I first got here was different than what it was 10 years ago, to what it was five years ago, to what it is today. It’s always evolving and changing, and we’re hopefully trying to make it better and better and better. But I feel like our seniors do a really good job of passing it on to the next group, their work ethic and relentless pursuit and putting team before themselves and just doing things the right way on and off the court. I think that if you do those things well, then the rest kind of hopefully takes care of itself.”

Kollars, a 6-foot middle blocker, is an example of that process in action as the lone senior on this year’s group. She’s stepped into a much larger role this year, both vocally and on the court where she’s averaging better then two kills a game while hitting around .400.

“Last year I had a great example with the seniors, and they really taught me how to lead well,” Kollars said. “Until this point, I’d never been a formal captain, but I’ve had a bunch of help from all the underclassmen to really support me in this leadership role, and they’re also taking on roles themselves, which I think is important.”

While the win is appreciated, Tuesday’s match would have been special for Saunders and the SkyHawks regardless of the result as the two teams participated in the Angels Among Us initiative in honor of Pediatric Cancer Awareness Month. Joining the “go gold” movement was an easy yes for the SkyHawks as one of their own, 17-year-old Sami Ketelsen, is battling a recurrence of metastatic osteosarcoma that first surfaced when she was 14 and resulted in the amputation of her right leg. Sami was there in the student section cheering on her schoolmates Tuesday night.

“Sami was one of my students last year, Miriam Souchek’s best friend, and so obviously seeing her journey and knowing her journey that’s still going on, and knowing that Angels Among Us, that’s one of their kids,” Saunders said. “Seeing it in person, she’s not our only student at Skutt Catholic that’s had cancer. We actually have had quite a few. We’ve had a couple pass away just in the last four years, and so being a part of an event that’s bigger than us is really important.”

Both teams wore golden warm-up shirts before the match and Skutt handed out gold paddles that read “We Care About Kids” to fans. Saunders quipped it looked more like a Pius X home match than a SkyHawk one when they took the court, but she was happy to see the teams come together.

“It’s a great cause,” Saunders said. “‘Go gold’ is a great cause, and they’re great people, and I hope we get to do it again in the future.”

These Angles Among Us warm-ups are everything. 💛

September is Pediatric Awareness Month, and Lincoln Pius X and Skutt Catholic are wearing “Go Gold” warm-up shirts in support of the cause. pic.twitter.com/UXC78gVZNU

— nebpreps (@THEnebpreps) September 9, 2026

Tuesday was a big win for this SkyHawk team as Skutt (6-4) had dropped four of its last five, finishing in fourth place at the season-opening Thunderbird Throwdown then dropping two 2-1 matches down in Kansas City over the weekend. With new starters nearly across the aboard, Saunders said her players are still learning who they are as a team.

“They’re a brand-new group,” Saunders said. “I haven’t had this much fun coaching a group in a long time, and it’s not to knock on any of the previous 15 years. This group’s just different. Their personalities are very different, they’re fun, super coachable, super good work ethic, but they’re just a great group of kids, and they’re going to battle, and they want to see each other succeed, and I think that’s a big part of it.”

Tuesday provided the SkyHawks with an opportunity to learn more about themselves in a clutch situation. After winning the first two sets handily, Skutt looked to be cruising to a sweep late in the third before the Thunderbolts rallied to earn set point at 24-23.

Back-to-back kills from junior Sydney Bartholet turned the tables and gave Skutt match point. Pius X junior Ofelia Ramirez-Rousseau tied it up with a kill, but the Thunderbolts missed the ensuing serve and junior Madison Zajicek ended a scrappy point with a big swing, terminating to seal the sweep.

“Sticking with it is a big thing,” Saunders said. “Pius comes back and pushes us, right? And they find a way to get a sideout, and they find a way to finish the game out which, for a young team, that’s pretty good, because they were pushed, right? They were on the edge …

“I do know that we were swinging, and we weren’t swinging the couple points before that. We were playing it safe, and so we have a little thing, a joke, whatever you want to call it, where one of our assistant coaches is just like, ‘No babies; don’t be babies, just go swing,’ and so that’s what they went out and did.”

Skutt had five attackers unofficially tally four or more kills, with junior Katie Callahan leading the way with eight. Zajicek, a South Dakota State commit, and Bartholet finished with six apiece. After losing one of the most terminal attackers in the state to graduation in West, Skutt’s offense is much more balanced this season as each of the attackers adjust to larger roles.

“I think they’re all willing to do their job, number one,” Saunders said. “None of them really, I don’t think, want to be the star, and so we can really balance things out and spread it out, get it to different people. On any given night, it could be their night to be a star, and I think that as long as they’re thinking that that way, then no miss is too big and no kill is too high, right? You don’t want to make a big deal out of things. You just want to slowly trek and get one point at a time.”

Saunders is also taking a by-committee approach with the setter position, with Souchek, a junior, splitting her rotations between setting and attacking while sophomores Ruby Link and Jessa McMenamin rotate in as well. On Tuesday, Saunders decided to let Link play in all three sets for the first time this season while McMenamin supported the team from the bench. Link performed well, leading the SkyHawks in assists with a new career high.

“She had a great practice yesterday, locked in, really consistent with her balls,” Saunders said of Link. “We’ve been using three setters the rest of the time, and we might still be using three setters, because when you have young kids, consistency is not always their forte, right? Tomorrow, Jessa might be the best setter, and the next day maybe it’s Miriam, and we’re just kind of rolling with it that way. But we also want to give them chances to be in multiple sets in a row and give an opportunity to really show what they can do without it being like one and done.”

Souchek made a big impact in a lot of ways on Tuesday, especially at the service line where she accounted for five of Skutt’s 10 aces. Callahan added two as Skutt kept Pius X out of rhythm for much of the match, resulting in a high error rate.

“We’ve been working a lot on serving,” Saunders said. “Even when we were in Kansas City, we took 2 Ls, but our serving was great. We had the other team out of system a lot. We didn’t do great in transition, and so that’s something that we’re really going to try to wrap in. Obviously, this is a kind of a big week with us with Pius, and then Elkhorn North on Thursday, but not a ton we can change, so it’s more just like cleaning some things up and then knowing that we can get to work again in our next couple days.”

Up next for Skutt is a rematch with Class A No. 2 Elkhorn North (11-0). After falling the to the Wolves in five sets in the state semifinals last season, the SkyHawks dropped a 2-1 match to the eventual champion in the Thunderbird Throwdown semifinals on Aug. 29.  This time the SkyHawks will be flying into the Wolf Down, and Saunders wants her team to focus on one thing: finishing.

“I really think that we played well against them, and then we just didn’t finish it off,” Saunders said. “Again, young team, which is why that was such a big finish right at the end of that match, because Pius came back just like Elkhorn North did in the semifinal at Bellevue, but instead of us laying down, we fought back. Right in that three points right there was a ton of growth for a young team, and so hopefully we give them a battle.

“Obviously, we’re going into their place, and they’re a really good team. There’s a lot of respect, I think, program to program, a lot of respect. But there’s also a lot of rivalry, right? Both teams are going to want to win. Both are going to give their best effort, and it’s going to be fun. It should be a great high school volleyball environment.”

Skutt Catholic volleyball coach Renee Saunders after the SkyHawks 3-0 win over Lincoln Pius X.

The win marks the 500th for Saunders as the head coach @SkuttCatholic. pic.twitter.com/pfgVY1oGjG

— nebpreps (@THEnebpreps) September 9, 2026