The night before boarding a plane to Colorado Springs, Aleeya Jones, 13, was excited July 6 to be moving into her highest level of training yet in the sport she loves, volleyball. But she said she was just as excited that the building where she would be training late into the evening is next door to the one where Olympic volleyball players are also training.

The Olympics were her goal when Wiscasset Newspaper readers met a younger Jones, and they still are. “I feel like I’ve improved so much,” she said. A recent growth spurt to about 5’7’’ has helped her playing; in volleyball, taller is better. “Oh, yes,” she said in a new interview with mother and coach Julie Jones at her side, on bleachers in the Wiscasset Christian Academy parking lot. Aleeya will enter her freshman year at the school next fall.

“This is a very crucial time for a volleyball player, because once they enter high school, all the college coaches can now look at them,” her mother said.

The Wiscasset girl has trained outside Maine before, after earning a spot at tryouts. But this month’s session, in the USA Girls’ Select National A2 Invitational Team Program, is her highest level of training yet. Julie Jones said her daughter is the only Maine girl ever selected for it, and this year, the only New England girl going.

“It’s so much fun, but very serious at the same time,” the teen said about past sessions she’s trained in. “You always have fun at these things if you love the sport, because you learn a lot and you want to keep doing it, like stay there the rest of your life.”

“Yeah, it’s hard to drag her away,” Julie Jones said. She was going with her daughter on the latest trip, as in the past. They expect to see little of each other due to the long training schedule, and the fact Aleeya would be staying in a dorm. She’ll have a friend at the training, a girl from Hawaii she first met at a Fort Lauderdale, Florida event, when they were 10.

“She just texted me a couple days ago and asked if I tried out. And I told her I was in the A2 division, and she said, ‘Me, too!’”

“That makes me feel better, a little ease that she knows someone going in,” her mother said.

Follow Aleeya’s progress in her sport on Youtube, at https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCBzsT0r-843AwKL-xE6_suA and on Facebook.

While she continues her volleyball pursuits this summer, she and her family have gearing up to host the second annual Dean Snell Cancer Foundation Volleyball Tournament. The fundraiser is set for July 23 at Jones Sand Court, 15 Suki Lane in Wiscasset. First serve is at 9 a.m. For more, contact Julie Jones at 522-8240 or justjules31@gmail.com.