Lora Webster doesn’t need a costume to appear as a super mom and wife to her family.
The big payday in Rio was gold for Katie Holloway and her dedicated teammates, climbing a big hurdle by defeating China.
structure from square one.” Her first two years in California, she played standing volleyball, which
she’d played through her sophomore year in high school before focusing on basketball full-time. But the timing of the standing game is very differ- ent, and she also found that it was too demanding on her body. After the U.S. team took silver at the 2014 ParaVolley World Champi-
onship, she hired a coach, had Hamiter send her multiple volleyballs and got a local gym to agree to let her practice in off hours. That improved her training, but it remained a work in progress. “The real struggle was getting people to play,” she says. “It was a full- time job outside of my full-time job, and it wasn’t really working in 2015. I was getting maybe two or three people at practice, including myself and my coach. So I decided to start travelling around the Bay Area to adult rec leagues. I would ask the director, ‘Can I come in for an hour and have one of your courts and some of your people to play sitting with me?’ And then I would drive to wherever they were – in Oakland, in the city (San Francisco) – and I would sit down and play. Basically, it was me teaching players how to play sitting, so I wasn’t getting the quality training that I would get in Oklahoma. But I was getting to see the ball come over in a six-on-six fashion, whereas before, with only a few people training, I could train skills and certain drills but not much else.” One place she was able to find quality players was Stanford University, which is just a few miles from where she works. Members of the Cardi- nal’s 2016 NCAA Division I Women’s Volleyball Championship team played sitting with her, including middle Inky Ajanaku, outside hitter Ivana Vanjak, opposite Merete Lutz and defensive specialist Kelsey Hum- phreys. On summer nights, Vanjak would often accompany Holloway to adult rec leagues all over the Bay Area. “I’d pick her up at Stanford, drive with her to Oakland, then drive her back to Stanford, then drive home (to Belmont) and get there at midnight.” Tiring and complicated as it was, there was one advantage to the patch-
work practice schedule. “It was really good for my body not to be training full time,” she says.
“This is a high-impact sport. You’re throwing yourself all over the ground. There’s only so much your body can handle. The training site is great for a certain amount of years, but you can’t maintain full-time play for too long. So for my body to be able to get that rest may have extended my career.”
One more time? As the U.S. Women’s Sitting Team prepares for the Super 6 in China
in May, Webster and Holloway are taking on a lighter volleyball load in 2017 before making any final decisions about a full-on push toward the 2020 Tokyo Paralympics. Both say they want to play in Tokyo, and both are training for this year’s big tournament – the Parapan Am Sitting Zonal Championships in Montreal in October, a qualifier for the 2018 ParaVolley World Championships in the Netherlands. But both also say they need balance. “It’s hard to say no because it’s very motivating when you win, and it was so fun,” Holloway says. “I’ve told Bill that if I’m going to make it to Tokyo, I’ve got to have some type of in-between life. It might get (hectic) again just before Tokyo, but this year and the year after have to be some kind of level in between.” For Webster, family is clearly first, but sitting volleyball is still very much in her sights. “My biggest concern is that it’s right for my husband,” says Webster, who was honored with the inaugural USA Volleyball All-Time Great Fe- male Sitting Volleyball Player award in 2015. “We knew what we signed up for, but he had a very tough year (in 2016) working full time and being a single parent when I was travelling. If it ever gets to be too much, we’ll have that conversation and then that’ll be it. Because family is my priority, and it’s not like I haven’t completed the mission that I’ve been on for almost 14 years. “But the other part is, this is all I know. This is who I am outside of a mom and a wife, so it’s hard to retire that part of yourself. But the decision isn’t my own anymore. Now there are four other voices to consider.”
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