Submitted photo / Mahoning Valley Sports. Fitch’s Rylie Simons (1) goes for a ball during the Falcons’ win over Massillon Perry on Aug. 26.

Rylie Simons doesn’t back down from a challenge.

A sophomore at Austintown Fitch, Simons’ favorite subject is math.

In her words, “it comes easy.” She thinks, one day, she would like a career in finance.

One of her favorite songs, Zach Bryan’s “Hey Driver,” features the lyric “take me down a road that’s just a little bit windy.”

It’s little wonder then, that Simons embraces the important position of setter on the Falcons’ volleyball team. She not only embraces it, she excels at it.

The Falcons are 8-1 this season and Simons is in the middle of it all. After setting a school record last season with 860 assists, Simons recently surpassed the 1,000 mark for her career and is fewer than 400 assists from the program’s all-time record.

And she has 2.5 seasons left to play.

“Her passing [skills] are amazing,” teammate and senior captain Afton Roby said. “She stands out from other setters I’ve had. She can do things others can’t.”

The Falcons needed to replace Jocelyn Jourdan, the school-record holder for career kills and 2022 Player of the Year in the All-American Conference. Jourdan was a third team All-Ohio selection and is now playing at Youngstown State this fall.

Simons has meshed well with the new hitters. Roby, senior Jordan Smith and sophomore Kylie Folkwein have combined for 314 kills in nine matches.

Simons has 358 assists this season, an average of about 40 per match or 10.8 per set. She has assisted on 88% of Fitch’s kills.

“Being a good setter is reading the defense, reading where the blockers are going to be and distributing the ball so the blockers don’t know where you’re going to set each time,” Simons said.

Standing 5-foot-5, Simons is an exceptional athlete, said Fitch coach Kylee Herberger.

“It’s a combination of her skills and her intelligence,” said Herberger, who is in her first season leading the Falcons’ program after succeeding Jody Bartlett. “She has the skills but she also has the court intelligence to make very smart choices. She creates a lot of one-on-one situations for our hitters that allows them to get those kills.”

Given her affinity for math, it’s not a coincidence that Simons has an analytic approach on the court. College decisions are a few months off, though, and she is simply enjoying life in the moment.

“She wants the best for the team and she wants us to do the best we can,” Herbeger said. “If she gets [the records] along the way, then she gets it along the way.”

Simons has also played softball when she was younger but now focuses on volleyball year-round. She played for Academy Volleyball Club in Cleveland the past two years but will compete with Infinity Volleyball Club, based in Salem, starting in December.

“It’s harder for the teams we play to know who she’s going to set to,” Roby said, “and also it breaks up our offense because she can set anywhere on almost every single ball that she gets, so it makes it a lot more tricky for people to play us.”

Simons said her decisions are more than instinct. She’ll take a look at the defense and see where the Falcons have an advantage along the net.

“Most of the time we’re saving a ball and it’s not going to be perfect every time so you’ve just got to make the best decisions,” she said. “Sometimes it’s based off of my location, so if it’s really far off the net I only have limited hitters. But if it’s a perfect pass, it’s really just who I think is going to score at the moment. Everyone is doing pretty good this year; I feel confident in setting for all of them.”

The Falcons were eliminated in a Division I district semifinal last season by Hudson in a five-set match. Their goal for this season is to advance farther in the postseason. To that end, Fitch has put together a challenging schedule.

The Falcons already own a five-set win over Notre Dame-Cathedral Latin, the 2022 Division II state champion, in which Simons set a school record with 53 assists — and a four-set win over Waynedale, a district champion in Div. III.

“That [win over NDCL] was something,” said Herberger. “We faced a lot of adversity in that match; our two starting [middle hitters] went down. That was just an all-around team win. It’s kind of like we got a little preview of how much work we put into becoming a team and that work is paying off.”

The Falcons played Crestview, another Div. III district champion, on Saturday, suffering their first defeat of the season 3-0. They also will play Marlington, a Div. II district champion, at the end of the regular season.

“I think our team is a lot more well-rounded,” Roby said. “Everyone can do everything and everyone plays their part. The rest of our schedule is going to be a lot more difficult but I still believe that we can beat them.

“A lot of our goals [are] to go farther in tournament play. …But we do have some tricky teams on our [schedule].”

For Simons, the sense of urgency is just as real as it is for her older teammates.

“That’s our biggest goal,” she said. “Just get past districts.”