While other toddlers chased bubbles, Bryn Kehoe had her eye on the family volleyballs. “I was learning to walk and learning to bump at the same time,” the sophomore says, placing her fists together, thumbs up.
That’s what happens when your mom is a two-time All-American volleyball player and your dad is a varsity star as well. “I was a total gym rat,” Kehoe says. “I watched my parents play on teams that went to adult nationals, and I always wanted to be a setter because that player was always in charge.”
That wasn’t the full extent of the dream, either. When Kehoe was learning the game in the late ’80s and early ’90s in North Bend, Ohio, “the setter was the shortest person on the team, and I would lie in bed at night and pray that I would be short. Now the game has changed and everyone wants to be tall, so I wish I were two inches taller.”
So says the 5-foot-11 player who, last December, became the first freshman to set her team to a national championship. Kehoe also established a Stanford single-season assist record, with 1,637, and led the team in service aces, with 37. Last summer she competed on the U.S. national team with All-American Kristin Richards, ’07, and also played on the junior national team, traveling to Turkey to play in the world championships.
“Being the team setter is like being a psychologist—you have to know how to push everyone’s buttons,” Kehoe says. “With some players, you can get in their face and say, ‘Hit this ball NOW!’ ” She turns the volume down and puts on a shy smile. “With others, you have to say, ‘Okay, you’re good, and I’m going to set you this ball, and you’re going to get a kill.’ ”
Like generations of Little League boys before them, Kehoe and her friends started serving volleyballs on elementary school club teams that their parents coached. They grew up analyzing passes at the dinner table and going to volleyball summer camps. “I always wanted to know how to get better,” Kehoe says. “And my parents would always have at least one thing in a game that I could have done better.” She’s still learning, she says, but now that means picking up fine points from national-team setter Robyn Ah Mow-Santos, “like the way her hands moved.”
“Bryn’s class is the one we’ve been waiting for,” says head coach John Dunning. “Their moms and dads were great volleyball players, and they didn’t force [their children] into it, but it was part of their life.” The number of these second-generation players, he says, is an indication “of our sport coming of age.”
That should help the Cardinal (16-2, 5-1 Pac-10) regroup after the graduation of Olympian Ogonna Nnamani, ’04, the nation’s top female collegiate volleyball player last year. “Everybody is trying to decide how good Stanford can be without Ogonna,” says Dunning, who has a 557-122 record in 20 seasons as a collegiate head coach and was named an All-Time Great Coach in 2005 by USA Volleyball. “Our team has to not replace Ogonna, but find a way to play better as a team.”
Two of the team’s five freshmen are making an immediate impact: Foluke Akinradewo, who has been a member of the junior national team for the past three years, and Cynthia Barboza, who was an alternate on the 2004 U.S. Olympic squad. At press time, Barboza was leading the Cardinal in kills with 255, followed by Akinradewo with 244. Apparently Kehoe has already figured them out.
