Something is being built in Martinsville, one dribble and one serve at a time. It starts in the elementary school gym, works its way through the junior high, and points squarely toward the future of Bluestreaks athletics. The people putting it together are coaches, teachers, parents, and alumni — and in several cases, all of the above.

Carrie Cross, a math teacher at the junior-senior high school who grew up in Martinsville and played basketball there through her senior year, runs the district's youth basketball program for boys and girls in kindergarten through fourth grade. What started as a one-week camp last year has grown into an eight-team, five-week program with Saturday morning games. She has 66 kids enrolled this year. "Just to get them exposure and some fundamentals and interest in the sport," she said. "Especially with girls — if they start earlier and get that interest a little earlier, it becomes more of a commitment."

The motivation is competitive as much as it is developmental. When Cross took her daughter to play in a league in another town, the gap between her first-year players and kids already a year into a program was impossible to miss. "They could dribble a ball, and our kids don't know how to do that yet. We've got to do something, because we want the kids to want to keep playing."

On the volleyball side, third-grade teacher and Martinsville alum Nici Evers launched a youth program last fall for girls in third through sixth grade. Forty-eight players came out in year one, organized into six small teams to maximize repetitions. Evers spent 13 years as the school's head volleyball coach before stepping away to raise her family, and she drew on that experience — recruiting most of her volunteer coaches from her pool of former players, now parents themselves. "I knew they would be getting the instruction that I gave them. Keep it consistent."

That consistency paid off quickly. Kaitlyn Stephens, who heads the junior high volleyball team, watched the program's first graduates arrive with noticeably sharper skills. The junior high drew 37 players this year — enough to run a B-game before every home match — and two sixth graders who came through the fall league stepped directly into starting roles on the seventh-grade team. "By the end of that season, it was phenomenal," Evers said. "So much growth."

The basketball pipeline is still taking shape, but the early signs are there. Vicente Herrera and Kaden Gard, both Martinsville graduates, run the junior high boys program together — Herrera coaching eighth grade while finishing his PE degree at Eastern Illinois University, Gard coaching seventh while completing his elementary education degree at Indiana State and student-teaching fifth grade at Martinsville Elementary. They've been coaching their hometown kids since shortly after their own graduation. "We've got a really good group of kids," Gard said, "and I think it's going to continue to improve."

This year's junior high basketball team carried 19 players, with fifth and sixth-graders pulled up to fill roster needs — a familiar adjustment in a small school. Both the seventh and eighth-grade teams won their opening regional games before falling in the second round. With Cross's youth program building fundamentals as early as kindergarten, Herrera is already looking ahead. "We feel like we could have won the seventh-grade regional this year and eighth grade next year. We've got it next year."

Martinsville competes in the Little Eastern Illinois Conference as the only Class 1A school in a field of mostly 3A programs — teams that hold tryouts and take only their best. Martinsville takes everyone. "We're trying to get all the kids involved and have that same competitive team," Stephens said. This year, the junior high volleyball team beat several of those larger schools anyway.

It's a long game, and everyone involved knows it. But the foundation is being laid — in a Saturday morning gym where a math teacher calls fouls, on a junior high court where two young hometown coaches are building something they plan to stick around for, and in the early grades where the next generation of Bluestreaks is just getting started.