Back in the early 1990s, when John Dunning was coaching for the University of the Pacific against Stanford and when women’s volleyball was played in Burnham Pavilion, the action could get pretty tight. As he recalls, “A player once said to me, ‘Is it okay if spectators are touching us when we’re serving?’”
The coach winces. He doesn’t want any elbows bumping this fall in Burnham, the intimate, 1,441-seat capacity gymnasium where the Cardinal women are playing again while Maples Pavilion is being renovated. At the same time, the players are “really excited about Burnham,” says sophomore outside hitter Kristin Richards. “The atmosphere is so much more intense and close.”
Richards, who was named Freshman of the Year by both the Pac-10 and Volleyball Magazine, averaged 3.38 kills and 3.03 digs per game last year. She returned to the court this season as half of one of the top outside-hitting tandems in the country. Last year Richards combined with senior Ogonna Nnamani for 1,019 kills—or about nine per game. And that was before All-American Nnamani spent eight months training for the Olympics, along with former Cardinal star Logan Tom, ’03, on the U.S. National Indoor Team. Nnamani saw a lot of court time in Athens and recorded 12 kills in the quarterfinal match against Brazil.
As the 2004 season progressed, the 12th-ranked Cardinal women (9-2, 2-0 Pac-10), bolstered by four freshmen, were playing a stronger defensive game than last year. Pac-10 conference coaches picked them to finish fourth. “We’ve been working very, very hard on defense, and last spring it was our whole focus,” Dunning says. “It takes strength to squat enough to play defense; you get sore and it takes its toll. But our team has done a good job and we’re much better at it.”
Senior Jen Hucke, who has played libero but is now a right-side hitter, agrees that the “low-all-the-time” defensive training is paying off. “Plus Burnham is packed, and we use that [crowd energy] to our advantage.”
As Richards dug for defensive saves, her parquet-crunching squeaks and squeals earned her a new nickname—Gus, after the noisy mouse in Disney’s Cinderella. “When I make errors on the court and do things a college player shouldn’t be doing, I tend to scream—and I do look like a mouse,” the 6-foot-tall player explains. “I’m probably a little hard on myself.”
That’s understandable for someone who grew up in a household where volleyballs outnumbered teething toys. Richards’s earliest memory has to do with kicking balls around the Utah Valley State College gym where her mom, Lori, coached volleyball for 24 years. After trying soccer and basketball, Richards settled on volleyball in high school and played it year-round, blocking balls on club teams from December until June, and scoring for her school team from August through November. There also were tournaments in Germany, the Czech Republic, France, Austria and Puerto Rico.
From age 9 to 14, Richards received coaching from her mom. Then her father, Dave, who played with the U.S. men’s national team prior to the boycotted 1980 Olympics, took over. Her older sister, Lauren, currently plays volleyball for Brigham Young University, where Richards’s parents met and played varsity ball. Given the alumni connection, it seemed likely that Richards, the No. 1 recruit in the nation, would head for BYU, too. But after visiting Stanford, she says, “I felt you couldn’t top the academics and athletics. If I’d passed up the opportunity, I think I would have regretted it the rest of my life.”
Richards has seen former teammates Sara Dukes, ’04, and Jennifer Harvey, ’04, graduate to play on professional teams overseas. And during the Olympics, she and the current squad watched as much televised beach volleyball as their Stanford practice schedule allowed, cheering like a ballroom full of Cinderella mice as former Cardinal Kerri Walsh, ’00, took home the gold. “I would love playing beach volleyball, and I wouldn’t mind living in California for the rest of my life,” Richards says.
That gets an enthusiastic second from Dunning, who is starting his fourth year on the Farm. “It’s actually good for your body because it’s not as punishing as the hard floor,” he says about the team’s practice sessions on the two campus sand courts, near the Arrillaga Family Sports Center. “We believe in having them play away from coaches, and away from the indoor game, to keep them enjoying the game.”
