ROWVA/Williamsfield Cougars Volleyball: 2026 Schedule, Results and Roster
ROWVA/Williamsfield Cougars · Oneida and Williamsfield, Illinois
Latest result: beat Delavan 2-0 on September 3. Now 1-3. Next: West Central at home, Tuesday September 8, 7:00.
2026: 1-3 · Coach: Lori Secrist · 2025: 32-7, Lincoln Trail champions
The best team in this coverage area last season, in any sport, has started 2026 with three straight defeats.
What they did last year
ROWVA/Williamsfield went 32-7 — a school record for wins — and finished 11-1 in the Lincoln Trail Conference. No other programme at any school we cover, in any sport, came within sixteen wins of that.
They ran 21 matches unbeaten from October 1 into the postseason. The school-record 29th win came against Bureau Valley in the regional semifinal, 25-20, 23-25, 25-21.
Then came the regional final against Wethersfield, the team that had handed them their only conference defeat a month earlier. The Cougars lost the first set 25-19 and won the next two, 25-18 and 25-23, for the regional championship.
The bus got a police escort back into Oneida.
The season ended at the Abingdon-Avon sectional, where Tremont won 25-10, 25-18.
2026 so far
- Aug 24 — lost at Brimfield, 0-2
- Aug 26 — lost to Cuba/Spoon River Valley, 0-2
- Aug 27 — lost to United, 1-2
Three matches, one set won.
Sept 3 — beat Delavan 2-0 (25-23, 25-17). The first win of the season, and it came on the road.
Why the drop-off is not a mystery
Four seniors graduated out of a rotation that had been together for two years. What is left is a strong junior class and four seniors of its own.
Juniors: Lyllah Shaffer (setter/right side), Eliza Tucker (outside), Kennedy Miller (outside), Ava Storm (libero).
Seniors: Addison Byrd (middle), Kinley Danner (middle), Maddi McGarry (outside), Hannah Gehring (opposite/setter).
That is a roster built to be good in 2027. Whether it is good in September 2026 is the question the next three weeks answer.
September schedule
| Date | Opponent | Site |
|---|---|---|
| Sept 1 | Peoria Heights | Home |
| Sept 3 | at Delavan | Away |
| Sept 8 | West Central | Home |
| Sept 9 | at Illini Bluffs | Away |
| Sept 14 | Elmwood | Home |
| Sept 15 | at DePue | Away |
| Sept 16 | Princeville | Home |
| Sept 19 | Galva | Home |
| Sept 22 | at Roanoke-Benson | Away |
| Sept 28 | West Central | Home |
| Sept 29 | Henry-Senachwine | Home |
| Sept 30 | Wethersfield | Home |
September 30 is the one. Wethersfield in Oneida — a rematch of last year’s regional final, against the team currently sitting at 3-1.
Where the team comes from
This is a co-operative between two separate districts. ROWVA in Oneida, population 696, whose own teams are the Tigers. Williamsfield, population 575, whose teams are the Bombers. Together they are the Cougars in gold and maroon.
Volleyball is one of the sports hosted at Williamsfield, along with baseball, softball and golf. ROWVA hosts basketball, football, track, cross country, wrestling and cheer.
So the volleyball team plays its home matches twenty miles east of the football team’s home field. It is worth checking before you drive.
Williamsfield also won a Class 1A regional title in its own right in 2026.
One thing we cannot resolve
MaxPreps lists ROWVA/Williamsfield in the Inter County Conference for 2026 and the Lincoln Trail Conference for 2025. The Lincoln Trail’s own website still lists both ROWVA and Williamsfield as members.
We have found no reporting of a conference change and suspect a data error, but we are not going to state either version as fact until the school confirms it.
Separately, ROWVA’s own district described the 2025 season as a “10-1 record, second place finish” — which contradicts the 11-1 first-place record in the compiled standings. Both cannot be right.
The postseason
State semifinals are Friday, November 13, with finals and third-place games Saturday, November 14, at CEFCU Arena in Normal. Class 1A plays first on both days.
Regional and sectional assignments for 2026 have not been published yet.
No school in this coverage area has ever won an IHSA volleyball state championship or finished as runner-up. Last year’s regional title is the deepest run any of them has made in some time.
October schedule
| Date | Opponent | Site | Time |
|---|---|---|---|
| Oct 5 | at Ridgewood | Away | 7:00 |
| Oct 7 | Galva | Home | 7:00 |
| Oct 8 | Peoria Christian | Home | 7:00 |
| Oct 12 | Abingdon-Avon | Home | 6:00 |
| Oct 12 | at Annawan | Away | 7:00 |
| Oct 19 | Knoxville | Home | 7:00 |
| Oct 20 | Midland | Home | 7:00 |
| Oct 21 | at Bureau Valley | Away | 7:00 |
Two schools, two record books
Because this is a co-operative, the IHSA keeps the history under two separate entries — and last season’s regional title is filed under Williamsfield, with Lori Secrist listed as coach.
Williamsfield regional titles: 1991, 1992 and 2025-26. Thirty-three years between the second and the third.
ROWVA regional titles: 1987 (as ROVA), 1988, 1989 and 1990 — four in a row at the end of the eighties, and none since.
Neither school has submitted an all-time win-loss record to the IHSA, and neither has ever won a sectional.
So the 2025 regional championship broke a drought measured in decades, whichever name you file it under.
How 2025 actually ran
The Cougars won their own tournament on October 18, going 5-0 in it.
They lost to Wethersfield on October 1 — their only conference defeat all season — and beat them 2-1 on October 30 in the regional final, on Bureau Valley’s floor.
The season ended on November 4 against Tremont at the Abingdon-Avon sectional.
The October run-in
Note October 12: two matches on the same day, Abingdon-Avon at home in the afternoon and Annawan away in the evening. And October 21 at Bureau Valley is a return to the gym where last season ended in triumph.
A record that confirms where the co-op is filed
One detail resolves the filing question we raised above. The IHSA’s Williamsfield entry includes a Class 1A regional championship in 2025-26, and the coach named on that row is Lori Secrist — the current ROWVA/Williamsfield head coach. Season and coach match on both sides.
That is about as close to confirmation as the public record allows: the co-op’s recent hardware is being filed under Williamsfield, not ROWVA. It also means the 2025-26 regional title belongs to this team, even though you will not find it by searching the ROWVA name.
The rest of the picture stays awkward. Neither school has a won-loss record on file with the IHSA at all — no coach totals, no school totals, just title rows. ROWVA’s entry shows four regional championships (1986-87 under the older “ROVA” spelling, then 1987-88, 1988-89 and 1989-90) and nothing whatsoever since 1989-90. That is thirty-six years of unfiled results, the longest gap of any program in this coverage area. Williamsfield’s entry shows three regionals — 1990-91, 1991-92 and 2025-26 — and no sectional.
So if you see a figure quoted anywhere as “ROWVA’s all-time volleyball record,” treat it as invented. There is no such number in the primary source. What we can say honestly: seven regional championships across the two lineages, no sectional title in either, and a regional won as recently as last season.
The predecessor schools add nothing — Wataga and Altona have no IHSA girls volleyball entries, which is expected given ROWVA consolidated before the sport began keeping records in 1974-75.
Send us results
Volleyball gets a fraction of the coverage football does around here, and almost none of these matches are written up anywhere. If you have a result, a stat line or a photo, send it in — we post them as they come and correct errors the same day.
Records from MaxPreps schedule pages, cross-checked where the site’s own pages disagree. Postseason results via the Peoria Journal Star. All area volleyball standings →
