El Toro’s boys volleyball team endured a miserable season in 2023.
The Chargers finished 1-23.
El Toro plays in the CIF Southern Section Division 6 championship match on Saturday. The Chargers (17-15) play Quartz Hill (25-12-1) in the Division 6 final at Cerritos College at 6 p.m. It will be the first CIF-SS championship match for El Toro boys volleyball.
What is behind this huge growth?
“Really, it’s the coach,” said El Toro senior setter Moses Kim, also a team captain. “He put us in the gym early, with 6 a.m. practices before the season started. He developed us as players, and we listened to his coaching and we developed well to make it to CIF (playoffs).”
The coach is 28-year-old Sean Dixon. His first season as the team’s head coach was that 1-23 season. Dixon, an Edison High alum who also played at Orange Coast College, said the players are responsible for the turnaround.
“After we went 1-23 all of those guys could have transferred out,” Dixon said. “But every single guy stayed. Last year we missed out on a CIF playoff (spot) by one game, but we did go from 1-23 to 11-16.”
Dixon, an assistant coach at Edison for two seasons before moving to El Toro, said senior outside hitter Ryan Lim, a three-year varsity starter, is the team’s “go-to guy.”
“Ryan has so much range when he’s attacking,” Dixon said. “We utilize him in the front row or the back row and he’s a super-consistent passer. He’s the guy who always gets us out of a tough spot.”
Kim is another three-year varsity starter.
“(Kim) does so much for our team,” Dixon said. “He’s a super-calm guy. We have a lot of personalities on the team, and when he talks to the team everybody listens.”
El Toro senior Moses Kim is the setter on the Chargers’ boys volleyball team that plays in the CIF Southern Section Division 6 championship match Saturday, May 17, 2025. (Courtesy of Kevin Warn)Senior opposite hitter Ben Earnshaw, who is 6-5, is another three-year varsity starter and El Toro’s other team captain. Earnshaw started the season as a middle blocker before moving to opposite hitter halfway through the season.
“Ben’s a tall presence at the net,” Dixon said. “He is very reliable for us at opposite hitter although he’s only been playing there the last two months.”
Jeremy Gould is a senior who mostly plays outside hitter but can play middle blocker, opposite hitter and libero.
“He is very steady on the court,” Dixon said of Gould. “His best strength is that he is the confident player on our team.”
El Toro opened in 1973. The first CIF-SS boys volleyball championship match was in 1974. So for this boys volleyball team to be the first in school history to play in a CIF-SS final is a remarkable achievement.
“All of our guys wanted to make it to CIF,” Dixon said. “Go to the finals, do something this program has never done before.”
Kim said the Chargers got an inkling of how good this season could be when they beat Foothill in a nonleague match March 4.
“I don’t think any one of us expected us to win,” Kim said, “and we won 3-0. That shocked all of us. We started thinking that if we play well we can beat a lot of good teams out there.”
When Dixon talked about “personalities” on the team, he explained it this way …
“They’re a very high-energy group,” he said. “If you’re walking around campus and hear guys talking from a mile away, it’s probably boys volleyball guys.”
Those boys volleyball guys can talk with pride about having created school history by being the first team in the program to play in a CIF championship match. They might have something more to talk about after Saturday.
NOTES
• Thursday’s Orange County releaguing meeting resulted in radical changes for the 2026-27 and 2027-28 school years. The Trinity League expands into a Trinity Conference for all sports except football. Rosary, which is currently in the Pacific Coast League after being in the Trinity League, will join Crean Lutheran, Pacifica Christian, Sage Hill and St. Margaret’s in the new conference. The Coast View Conference adds Irvine, Northwood, Portola, University and Woodbridge, and Laguna Beach leaves the Pacific Coast League to join north Orange County’s Century Conference. …
• Orange County has teams in eight of the nine CIF-SS boys volleyball division finals. Admission to the finals at all sites is $14 for adults and $7 for students and for children of ages 5-13. GoFan.co is the exclusive place to purchase CIF-SS tickets. …
• The boys volleyball season continues after the finals with the CIF Southern California Regional that begins Tuesday. The CIF Southern Section gets 14 berths in the four eight-team brackets. Six of those 14 teams will be from CIF-SS Division 1 – likely CIF-SS Division 1 finalists Huntington Beach and Mira Costa, plus Beckman, Corona del Mar, Newport Harbor and Redondo, with the others the champions of the other eight CIF-SS playoff divisions. Regional brackets come out Sunday …
• The CIF-SS track and field finals for all four divisions are Saturday at Moorpark High. Orange County will be represented by many athletes who have the potential to do very well. Aliso Niguel shot put and discus thrower Jaslene Massey is the state leader in shot put at 50 feet, 7 inches and second in the state in the discus 159-8. Dana Hills senior distance runner Evan Noonan is the state leader in the 1,600 (4 minutes, 4.88 seconds) and is third in the state in the 3,200 (8:55.95). The Servite 4×100 relay team is the state record holder (40.00 seconds) and seven sprinters for the Friars qualified in the 200.
• Missing at the CIF-SS track and field finals will be Rosary’s record-setting 4×100 relay. Rosary set the Orange County record in the event with a time of 45.21 seconds last month, but a baton drop at last week’s prelims kept the Royals from being one of the nine that qualified for the Division 4 finals.
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