I started playing volleball way back in sixth grade. It wasn't my first choice, though. I was a basketball player convertee. Basketball was a tough, respectable sport for a tomboy like myself. Volleyball was wussiness. Hehe..... at least this was the way I saw it. So I reluctantly gave volleyball a try.
At first I hated it.....my coach was some high school player who didn't know the first thing about motivating a bunch of grade school girls. I was miserable for about two years as she struggled to coach us.
Then in eighth grade, she moved away to go to college and we were left coachless. My mom (who pusuaded me to play volleyball in the first place) found us a coach.....a real coach. Her name was Kerri and she had played, on shcolarship, at K-State. Kerri actually coached us and low and behold...we started winning! Suddenly I like volleyball a lot more :) She got me involved on another team, in Junior Olympic (JO) or USVBA.
Thereafter I played and played and played volleyball. There wasn't a week that I didn't at least touch a volleyball from the summer before my freshman year in high school to the summer I went to college.
High school volleyball was fun for me, but it just wasn't as competitive at JO was. I started as the varsity setter my sophomore year and led SM North to some pretty unspectacular records. But in my junior year, SMN had the first winning season in about 12 years! So that was good.
I considered playing JO volleyball the real season. I played on two different teams during my sophomore, junior, and senior years in high school and each team that I played on won the regional tournament. This was always bunches of fun becuase it gave our team an automatic bid to the National Tournament. Well, each year we went, once to Orlando, FL, once to San Jose, CA, and once to Denver, CO. Volleyball was my ticket to travel. And it gave me an opportunity to see a college that I most likely would have overlooked in my school search process.
Not only did volleyball give me these things, but it also gave me the intangible gift of confidence. By nature I'm a shy, unassuming girl, but when I get out on the court, I know what I need to do to make a team win......and well, you just can't do that without some self-esteem :)
That's my volleyball story.
Links to other sites on the Web
This is a wonderful collection of vb links.
Here's the SMC volleyball homepage....it's not quite complete.....Coach is still working on it :)
Here's a picture of a girl I played with in high school. Deanna went on to get a full-ride to the University of Virginia.
Here's the U of V sports homepage
A good friend of mine, Julie, got a full-ride to K-State....here's their vb homepage
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e-me!
� 1997 [email protected]
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