The final point in the December 18 championship match was a window on a hard-fought season.
The 11th-seeded Cardinal, which hadn’t lost in 14 matches, was poised to take home the NCAA title as senior outside hitter Jen Hucke launched a blistering serve. Sophomore Kristin Richards stared down the Golden Gophers of fourth-seeded Minnesota and handily blocked the return. As the ball came back over the net, all eyes turned to senior Ogonna Nnamani, as they had all season. The 6-foot-1 Olympian soared off the floor and drilled the game-winning kill—from the back row.
“They were not able to stop her offensively,” coach John Dunning says. “She just kept getting better and better.”
Led by Nnamani’s younger sister, Njideka, ’07, the Cardinal women (30-6, 15-3 Pac-10) piled onto Nnamani after her 29th and final kill of the day, hugging and crying on the parquet floor of the Long Beach Arena while the Band played on. It was the sixth championship for Stanford, and the second under Dunning.
At the start of the season, the coach knew he had a winning mix—including a returning freshman of the year (Richards), a high school player of the year (Bryn Kehoe) and an Olympian who kept breaking her own records—but he couldn’t predict how well they’d fare. “The odds were that we were going to be good, but Ogonna missed the whole fall camp of 30 practices, and we didn’t have any idea what lineup we were going to use or whether we could play together,” he says. “We were a mystery and it could have gone either way.”
After the Cardinal started the season 10-4, Dunning asked Nnamani to take the floor during a team dinner. “She talked about all the times she’d had to fight through on the national team, trying to make the Olympic team,” he recalls. “She talked about how difficult it was to raise her level of play, and how sometimes she thought she wasn’t good enough—and how, the next day, she’d go back and try harder.” Nnamani’s pep talk got her teammates’ attention. “We beat UCLA that night and got it on a roll,” Dunning says.
The players’ morale cemented itself later that month after a come-from-behind victory over undefeated Washington, 3-2. “We could easily have lost, but magic made it happen in our favor,” Dunning says. “And when that starts to happen, you start to believe.”
As Nnamani got better, Dunning adds, “the rest of the team kept improving in a way that it could showcase what she could do.” Playing a tough field of competitors and traveling to regional NCAAs in Florida and Wisconsin during final exams tested—and proved—the team’s mettle. By the time they faced Minnesota in the championship match, the women were playing their best volleyball of the season. Hucke contributed nine kills, Richards produced eight kills and 11 digs, Kehoe dished out 48 assists, and middle blockers Liz Suiter, ’07, and Franci Girard, ’08, and libero Courtney Schultz, ’06, “played amazingly well,” Dunning says. Nnamani was named the tournament’s most outstanding player after hitting .562 for the match, and Hucke, Richards and Kehoe joined her on the NCAA All-Tournament team. Her career total of 2,450 kills puts her first in the Stanford and Pac-10 record books, and in January she was voted the nation’s top female collegiate volleyball player.
As for Dunning, he was so stunned by the win that he boarded the USC bus outside the arena and almost missed the Cardinal celebration. “I probably won’t live that one down.”
