“
Strength has always been a weakness of mine, no pun intended.
I’d go to practice (while I was on the lifting program) and I’d be sore, and sometimes I’d be pretty wiped out. But it helped me a lot because not only was I able to build strength, it helped me play with fatigue.
FETTUCCINE ALFREDO IS A FRAUD? APPARENTLY SO. At least that’s the message that has been drummed into U.S. outside hitter Aaron Russell, who is experiencing his first season of profes- sional club ball this winter playing for Sir Safety Conad Perugia in Italy’s top volleyball league.
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“My Italian teammates are always making fun of me about it,” said Russell on Skype a week before Christmas. “They’ll say, ‘Why is fettuccine Alfredo said to be a traditional Ital- ian dish when it’s not? We don’t even have that type of sauce here.’” Russell may be a latecomer to pasta, but he got the earliest possible start to his volleyball education, which has taken him to a very high level at age 22 – a key U.S. starter who played a major role in the team’s gold-medal performance last fall at the FIVB World Cup. There’s a home movie of 2-year-old Aaron playing balloon volleyball in the kitchen of his family home in Ellicott City, Maryland, with his 3-year old brother, Peter. In one snippet, as described in a Washington Post story, Peter grabs the balloon to serve, then says: “Get weady, Aawon. Get weady.” Those toddler games were the beginning of mentoring from Aaron’s father, Stew Russell, who played volleyball at Penn State in the 1980s. Stew made a point of not only teaching his boys the game but reinforcing the little things that sometimes get overlooked. “Whenever my dad had a break at a tournament, he would pick up a ball and take me and [Peter] to an empty court and teach us how to pass,” Aaron says. “He would always talk to me about ball control when I was little. I wouldn’t want to go through the pass and set when my dad would toss me the ball. I wanted to hit, and then I would get upset after I hit because I’d want to hit it again. But my dad would say, ‘No you have to do the pass and set first.’” Stew coached Aaron throughout his junior
club career, and Aaron was also coached by 1984 Olympic gold medalists Aldis Berzins and Stew’s former doubles partner, Ric Lucas, who had sons around the same age as the Russell boys. Aaron, now 6-9, remembers that Berzins and Lucas would always put him in passing drills, even though he played mostly middle as a junior. He also recalls something
that Stew told him frequently: “A big man with ball control is important.” “It’s something that my dad has always tried to make sure I understand.”
HIS COACH AT PENN STATE, MARK Pavlik, had a different message for him. “It was our goal to make sure that he understood that with the wonderfully athletic body he had, we didn’t want him playing the game like a 6-1 or 6-2 kid,” Pavlik says. “Once he embraced his physicality and his athletic ability, his confidence just shot up.” Pavlik often inspired him by mentioning the name of another Penn State big man, Matt Anderson, who preceded him as a Nittany Lion by a few years and now starts alongside Russell on the U.S. Men’s National Team. (An- derson, who is considered one of the world’s top attackers, played for Penn State from 2006 to 2008; Russell finished his four-year career there in 2015.)
“I was a middle my freshman year, and I made the switch outside my sophomore year,” he says. “I would always hear that middles can swing away at every ball but outsides and even opposites have to control the ball a little bit more. I saw other players roll shot or tip or cut the ball around, so I think I got caught up in that. Sometimes in practice, if I tipped and the other side picked it up and scored, Pav would come right up and I knew exactly what he was going to say. It was, ‘Matt Anderson never cared about making an error.’ If he hit the ball out or got blocked, he would be like, ‘I’m Matt Anderson. That doesn’t affect me. I’m just going to keep swinging away because I’m Matt Anderson.’ That’s exactly how Pav would say it. I thought it was pretty funny.” But he listened, and if he needed further urging in that direction, it came from his teammates one day at a players-only meeting. They went around the room, each sharing thoughts about the team, and “one thing I got from everyone was that I need to swing at the
Aaron Russell quick facts
Hometown: Ellicott City, Maryland College: Penn State
Position: outside hitter. (But he played middle blocker as a freshman at Penn State and also in juniors club volleyball, and he has also played some opposite.)
Height: 6-9
Accomplishments: Leading scorer for the U.S. Men’s National Team in the final three matches of the 2015 FIVB World Cup in which they won the gold. Led Penn State to four consecutive NCAA semifinals from 2012 to 2015; AVCA All-America First Team in 2014 and 2015; Won the inaugural Karch Kiraly award in 2015 as the best outside attacker in NCAA men’s volleyball.
On getting pranked by his Italian teammates: “A lot of the guys are jokesters, and they know I don’t know how a lot of things work here, so they’ll tell me that practice is a certain time when it’s not. I just kind of believe them for a second and they have their laugh. If I listen to them, I look stupid. If I don’t listen to them and come late, then I’m in trouble.”
U.S. Coach John Speraw on Russell’s vision as a hitter: “When some hitters go from one level to the next, they hit it at the same trajectory that they did before, and all of a sudden there’s a big hand in that spot. When Aaron takes a swing, he sees the hand in a higher place, so he simply hits a higher shot. It just seems to come naturally to him, and it’s because he sees the game so well. I think that’s a special gift.”
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— Aaron Russell on strength training
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