For freshman setter Alex Smith, she hasn’t wasted time making a name for herself on the volleyball team.
As the starting setter in the Holiday Inn Brownstone Volleyball Challenge, she earned All-Tournament team honors, and against North Carolina nearly a week later, she had 26 assists in the game during a 3-0 loss.
But unlike most college athletes, she hasn’t been playing her sport her whole life. In fact, she only started playing volleyball in high school.
“I started in my freshman year of high school,” Smith said. “I played basketball for my whole life. I went to high school, and I always wanted to try volleyball so I tried out for the high school team and I made JV.”
Smith said after basketball season, the coaches tried to persuade her father to allow her to play club volleyball outside of high school, but he wasn’t too sure of that idea.
“He was like, ‘no, no, she doesn’t need to do that — waste of time, waste of money. Whatever, it was stupid,'” Smith said.
“So we weren’t going to do it. So they persuaded us that if I play club that I can get a college scholarship in the end if I work really hard. So then he was like, ‘OK, it’s a good investment.’ I did that all four years of high school, so that’s how I got started in volleyball.”
The California native went on to win a number of awards and championships while in high school — including state and league titles in 2006. But during her junior year in high school, Smith suffered a knee injury.
“I was playing basketball — I was on the basketball team still,” Smith said.
“So I went up for a lay up, I hurt my knee. I tore my meniscus so I went through arthroscopic surgery, and I was supposed to be back within a couple of months, and everything was supposed to be fine. And for some reason, my knee was messed up, and it kept swelling. So I was out pretty much a whole year.”
The injury did scare a lot of schools that were recruiting her, but not coach Charita Stubbs, who said she was not afraid that Smith sustained the knee injury.
“The injury only allowed her not to be seen by other schools,” Stubbs said. “So, that was something that was actually to our advantage, because we knew that she had recovered from the injury, but it was something that would take a little time for any injury.”
As for Smith, being miles away from home does have its setbacks. Most of her friends and family are in California.
“They always wonder why I wanted to go so far away from California,” Smith said. “But I told them that I just love the school here, and the only thing that my dad doesn’t like is that he can’t just drive out here and come watch me play, so he probably gets to see me play maybe twice a year, which that kind of sucks because he’s my biggest fan.”
“But they’re all proud of me that I got a scholarship. It wasn’t that big of a surprise for my family because we always knew that I’d get a scholarship because I’m such a hard worker. They’re really proud of me.”
Stubbs believes Smith was the right player to go after and that she could be tremendous for the next few years.
“Recruiting isn’t an exact science,” Stubbs said. “Sometimes you get a good one; sometimes you get a bad one. We definitely got a good one out of her.”