Posted: Jan 16, 2018

From Walk-On to National Champion

I don’t even really remember running onto the court. Suddenly, I was just there. Confetti was raining down on us as the whole team piled on top of one another in a heap of excitement and disbelief. Safe to say, winning the National Championship was one of the best moments of my life. I felt so lucky. How did I get from the PE volleyball class to the National Championship?

After my last high school volleyball game, I thought I would be one of the ~97% of high school seniors who do not go on to play sports in college¹. There was a defining moment when I was at a tournament in Denver, Colo. my senior club season and the head coach of the CMS volleyball team, Kurt Vlasich, walked by. I saw the CMS logo on his black polo and I knew I was interested in Harvey Mudd. I thought Do I go up and talk to him? Introduce myself? But I didn’t. I didn’t want to play college volleyball.

It was a hard decision, but I knew it was the right one. I had sacrificed a lot of academic and social experiences for sports in high school, and I wanted college to be full of new experiences, not more of the same. I got exactly what I had hoped for and more. I came to college and was inundated by the HMC core curriculum and eccentric culture. I made new friends and even joined the combat robotics team.

However, I had played volleyball for six years and it was hard to go cold-turkey. I thought it would be harmless to sign up for the PE volleyball class. Kurt taught the course, so I got to know him a little better and became familiar with his coaching style. Winter came, and I joined the Claremont Colleges 5C club volleyball team. I enjoyed playing on this club team for two years but by the end of my sophomore year I was yearning for something more competitive. I felt like something was missing. I had a mid-college crisis and realized the huge role athletics had played in my life growing up.

It was my friends who convinced me to try to join the team. I was pretty doubtful that it would work out, but I figured I had nothing to lose. I crafted one of the most nerve-wracking emails of my life, took a deep breath, and sent it to Kurt. I was shocked when he offered to meet with me and then let me walk on to the team. He suggested I start practicing in the spring because joining in the fall would be “like dropping a goldfish in boiling water.”

This was the terrible image I couldn’t get out of my head as I walked into the gym for the first time. It was very intimidating to go from basically two years off to practicing with one of the best teams in the country. However, I quickly realized I had a lot in common with the other girls on the team. Pretty soon, they became some of my best friends.

Easily, joining the volleyball team was one of the best decisions I’ve ever made. I made lifelong friends and kept playing the sport I loved. Being a CMS student-athlete has been an enormous privilege and I am so lucky to have had all these new and exciting experiences the last two years of college. Obviously, one of the biggest highlights was winning the National Championship. To end my career on the biggest stage possible with a ‘W’? That’s every athlete’s dream.

After all the confetti settled and I was boxing up my mini-trophy, I thought about all the events leading up to this, our team’s crazy journey, and how close I was to not being there for any of it. Typical me, I thought of one of my favorite bizarre theoretical physics theories: the multiverse². Loosely speaking, this is the idea that there are multiple universes, each representing a different set of probabilistic outcomes. For example, when you make a decision, the universe splits and in one universe you make one decision and in another you make the opposite decision. This is not a well-respected theory, but I still thought about how there may be one (or many) universes out there where I didn’t join the team. Didn’t meet these amazing people. Didn’t get to make CMS history. It could have easily been this universe. I guess the moral of this unusual story is the cliché message of “Go for It.”

Many people didn’t think we could win the National Championship and none of us knew how rewarding and significant the journey would be. I didn’t think I could join the team no less thrive in the CMS environment. In addition to all the knowledge gained from the experiences along the way, I learned one email can seriously change your life. Sometimes you just have to send it.