COVER STORY
Balancing books, volleyball and life: A guide to success
Playing the game at a high level while maintaining a good grade point average is no cake walk. With help from a number of experts, we’ve put together an instructional manual on how to tackle the turmoil and make it all OK. by Don Patterson
H
overing over Rachel Williams like a gray cloud was a school paper she wasn’t eager to write. This was mid-November. Williams and her Stanford teammates were entering the stretch run of a 2013 sea- son that would end one weekend before they wanted it to end with a tough, fi ve-set loss in the regional fi nals to soon-to-be champion Penn State. The subject of her assigned paper was Islam’s par- ticipation in government in the Arab world. It only had to be three or four pages, but it was due in less than a week and Williams, a senior outside hitter, wasn’t really in the mood to get after it.
On the plane ride home from a team trip to Utah,
Williams mentioned the paper to a teammate, and the teammate said: “Do it now. Get it out of the way.” A nudge was all it took. A day later – a Sunday afternoon – she assembled her notes, sat down with her laptop and cranked through the entire paper. “I’ve been a lot less stressed this whole week and weekend because I got that out of the way,” she said a few days later from Oregon, where Stanford would score a sweep of University of Oregon and Oregon State University. “It would not have been fun to do on the road.” Working ahead is something Williams has made a practice of throughout her career as a student-volley- ball player. That helps explain why she was a straight- A student in high school at Archbishop Mitty (also the alma mater of three-time Olympic gold medalist Kerri Walsh Jennings) and was nominated for the dean’s list at Stanford in 2012.
“My teammates make fun of me because I get stuff done so early,” she says. “I’m not one to procrastinate.
BOOKISH BRUIN: UCLA’s Karsta Lowe does some heavy lifting on and off the court. (Photo: Don Liebig)
32 | VOLLEYBALLUSA • Digital Issue at
usavolleyball.org/mag
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68 |
Page 69 |
Page 70 |
Page 71 |
Page 72 |
Page 73 |
Page 74 |
Page 75 |
Page 76 |
Page 77 |
Page 78 |
Page 79 |
Page 80