Stanford Volleyball will be playing in our 20th
Final Four this week. That’s a lot of years of great players coming through
this program and you’ll hear all about some of them if you turn on ESPN
Thursday night. You’ll hear about the four freshmen we put out in our starting
lineup who all carry significant loads for us. You’ll hear about our 6’8
opposite who is the bane of every opposing outside hitter’s existence. You’ll
definitely hear about our redshirt senior, Inky Ajanaku, who’s led this young
team here. But I don’t want to tell you about them right now. I want to tell
you about the Machine Team.
That’s the name we’ve given our “B team”—the players who
play on the other side of the net in practice and who stand on the sideline in
games. They’re the ones who our starters have to go up against every day and if
they ever let up we stop getting better. They have to be a machine. I’ve always
felt like you get the true measure of a person when you watch how they act when
they step onto the other side of the court. “Strong leaders” can get quiet;
“hard workers” can stop going for balls. But the reality is, if you can only be
a good teammate on one side of the net then you aren’t actually a good
teammate.
These kids we have are the BEST teammates. They come into
practice every single day ready to get better. They’re mindful of what they’re
working on and what their teammates are working on. They bring a genuine joy
and excitement for learning and competing. They bring their A-game every time
we play six-on-six and it forces our starters to do the same. We’ve improved
dramatically over the course of this season and it has as much to do with them
as anyone. The moment those players on the B-side lose motivation is the moment
a team’s progress starts to stall. Practices start to drag and the joy goes out
of the process. But they never lost the motivation and we never lost the joy.
Then, of course, there are the matches. The Machine Team is
always ready for game day. They have chants and dances for every person and
situation and they are 100% in it from the first whistle. In our regional final
last weekend there were 6000 Wisconsin fans yelling for their team and I could
still hear our bench cheering on their teammates.
There will be little kids all over the country watching this
weekend, dreaming about their own future. They’ll want to grow up and hit like
Inky or fly around the court like Morgan. And I hope they do. But I hope they
also see the eight kids on our bench at any given time that are throwing a
dance party on the sideline and I hope they want to be like them too—good
teammates above all else. They don’t give out trophies for that, but if they
did, I’d give every last one to the Machine Team.
