Volley - Baller

 How often do you leave your comfort zone?

Volley Baller

Like most reasonable people, I generally don’t enjoy pain… unless it’s the sting of a volleyball ricocheting off my forearms to float perfectly into a setter’s hands. I started playing volleyball my freshman year at Uni and came onto the team with very little experience. Joining volleyball was a real leap of faith for me, but I’ve grown to love the sport and I’ve never looked back. The most important lesson I’ve learned as a part of this team is to embrace pain and the inevitable failures. 

Before starting at Uni High, I never considered myself to be an athlete. While I’d played different sports through the Champaign Park District before, I’d never been good at them at a competitive level. And it didn’t help that my older brother was a star track athlete and also a football player. I, on the other hand, had terrible stamina and hated running. I was decidedly un-athletic. I sometimes felt like the least athletic of the four kids in my family. I think this is one reason that I dove so far into STEM topics at a young age because I wanted to have something I was “good” at. So I was good at being the nerd. At ten years old, you’d have to pry a book about compounds out of my cold dead hands. But sports? That was just an area could never do well. I was so caught up in the image I had for myself that I didn’t see any way to change. 

And then in my subfreshman year at Uni, I remember attending a climate rally on campus. The color code was orange so I was wearing a PrimeTime shirt from a beginner’s volleyball workshop I’d attended some years back. Two Uni upperclassmen noticed my shirt and encouraged me to join the volleyball team next year. I remember enjoying the boot camp, where I learned mainly how to pass and set. However, I’d been too scared to try out for the notoriously good Edison middle school team when I was in 6th grade. But Uni was a new place, a clean slate, I thought. So, with encouragement from the upperclassmen, I decided to give school sports a chance. 

I’m not really sure why volleyball was the sport that got me so excited about athleticism. Honestly, I think I was most motivated by the fear of failure. Our freshman season was pushed from the fall of 2020 to the spring of 2021 due to high rates of COVID-19. This meant I had more time to prepare myself and wasn’t wasting any of it. Thus I spent both the summer and fall of 2020 conditioning like I never had before and learning as much as I could about volleyball. I even organized to play at the park with some friends who were also joining the team. 

But then, eventually, the season officially started and… I failed anyway. I failed at passing accurately, I failed a lot at spiking or serving over the net. More than anything in my first (and subsequent) seasons,  I didn’t understand how the game worked or what rotations were. I had no idea where I physically needed to be on the court. Our coach calls this understanding of gameplay and game-readiness “volleyball IQ” and mine was abysmally low. It was frustrating being so objectively bad and there were days in every season where I left upset, disappointed, or even in tears. I felt like I was terrible despite all my work to avoid this very thing. 

Of course, I can see now how this isn’t a very reasonable train of thought. All of my “failures” were simply a part of learning, of gaining muscle memory. No amount of playing with friends at the park or workouts at home could prepare me for being on the court with a volleyball in play. I had to learn to treat each experience as a gift and try to find grace in disappointment even when it’s hard. Even now, after four seasons, I’m not where I thought I would be, who I thought I would be. But now, I can embrace the sore arms, scraped knees, and even rolled ankles. I can accept missing a serve or shanking a pass. With every “failure”, I can practice being unshakable. I’ve started to see myself as a competent athlete. 

We really can never know what we’re capable of unless we push ourselves, unless we do the things we tell ourselves we could never do. Anything is possible when we embrace the sting of defeat.