Two things might come to mind when observing the way the AU women’s club volleyball team constantly hustles and dives to the ground.
One, these girls love volleyball. Two, their team doctor must be extremely busy.
But the team does not have a doctor. The team’s medical personnel is a box with some bandages and wraps. The team also lacks the time and money compared to its opponents.
Yet the team competed April 4-6 in the NCVF Collegiate Club Volleyball Championships for the first time since the team was started five years ago.
“When it comes to tournaments and other things, if a player gets injured, when we go to other schools they’ll have five EMTs there waiting in case anything happens,” team manager Ari Silverstein said. “Here, if you get hurt, they don’t even have a bag of ice for you.”
He wasn’t exaggerating.
As Silverstein explained the team’s medical problems, almost on cue, a player rummaged for an icepack. After she found out there wasn’t any ice, she marched back onto the Bender Arena court and continued to practice.
The lack of an icepack isn’t anything new to club volleyball. Silverstein has been with the team for four years and remembered a time that the team had to rush across the street to buy ice from McDonald’s to treat an opposing player.
“We are the lowest funded program in the Patriot League,” said Shomari Kee, the assistant director of club and intramural sports at AU.
Each club receives money from the school based on the team’s activity, how much it fundraises and the budget the team asks for at the end of the academic year. Each club is responsible for raising almost 43 percent of their total funding.
“We’re going to nationals for the first time this semester,” Royer said. “It costs a lot of money to go there. We’ve been doing pizza fundraisers . . . just anything we can do to really get money in because it is so important.”
Clubs also raise money by holding tournaments, where the host club receives money from participating schools.
However, the lack of time available to the team to use Bender Arena has hurt the team’s ability to hold a tournament of its own.
“In a fundraising sense, it affects us,” team president Tenisha Brown said. “We’re trying to play more and we’re also trying to fundraise at the same time. So when we’re not able to do that we’re missing out on both of those things.”
March 30 marked the first time the club has been able to host a tournament in almost a year.
“I think the money thing is big,” Kee said. “But a lack of resources is a larger issue.”
One of the largest resource issues the team must deal with is also a lack of court time for practice.
“We get to practice twice a week,” player and coach Rachel Rea said. “So, in total we have four hours of playing time together. So a lot of it is trusting the girls to go to the gym on their own.”
Rea also said the team only goes to about four or five tournaments a season, whereas its opponents, like Virginia Tech and James Madison, go much more often.
The lack of court time puts the team at a disadvantage when it comes to communicating on the court.
“Volleyball is about playing together,” Rea said. “And if you only get a certain amount of court time to actually get that repetition, there’s only so much you can do.”
Rea and others have forged a team that varies in experience but has the same positive, enthusiastic attitude throughout the team, and they’ve crafted the squad into a highly competitive and successful club — a club that was only one win shy of winning its pool at nationals.
“Attitude is pretty much what ties everyone together, regardless of playing level,” Rea said.
The main reason the team is so successful and able to stride over obstacles with such ease is through the leadership of Rea, Brown and Silverstein.
“The leadership on the volleyball team is outstanding for the simple fact that they’re going to nationals,” Kee said. “I don’t allow clubs that have faulty leadership, inactivity in their executive boards and lack of funding to go to nationals.”
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