KSU volleyball leaves on European tour

From TheMercury.com
http://www.themercury.com/k-statesports/article.aspx?DB_OEM_ID=400&artic...
Joshua Kinder jkinder@themercury.com

The Kansas State volleyball team packed its bags and set out to Europe on Monday.

The Wildcats have waited a long time to be able to do that too after packing their bags two years ago only to unpack them just days before they were supposed to leave for China.

K-State was set for its Chinese competition tour, but three days before the team was to leave, it learned the agency that the trip was booked with had filed bankruptcy and subsequently lost the $150,000 that had already been paid by the university — putting a halt to all travel plans and nixing the trip altogether.

The story was picked up by ESPN television show, "Outside the Lines," which identified six other schools that had too lost out on trips booked with Transport Athletics.

But two years later, K-State is finally making its trek — this time to Europe where the Wildcats will play five matches in Hungary, Slovenia and Italy over the next eight days.

As much of a downer as the failed China trip proved to be for K-State, the story touched a nerve with a Kansas City-based agency that specializes in competitive athletic tours and mission trips — USA Athletes International — that set out to give the KSU program its trip after all.

"They approached us with the opportunity to make it right," K-State coach Suzie Fritz said Saturday as the Wildcats were wrapping up 10 days of practices before heading out. "They said they were sorry about what happened and that this wasn't the norm in this business.

"They have basically come in and donated a majority of this trip for our team. Otherwise, we would never be able to go in this financial climate, plus we had already paid for another trip and didn't get to go."

"It's too good to be true, to be honest," Fritz added.

But it is true, as K-State left today for Budapest, Hungary where it will play the Hungarian National Team and the Vasas Sport Club, while touring the city and seeing the Buda Castle and Matthias Church.

K-State will then travel to Ljublana, Slovenia to play two more matches, before ending the trip with two days in Venice, Italy where the Cats will play a final match and tour the City of Water by gondola.

It will be a bit of a reunion of sorts too, as Fritz will see former Wildcats Valeria Hejjas and Rita Liliom, who both play professionally in Hungary.

"It's great because we have people from different countries come into our program, so it's cool to learn about their culture and actually experience it and see where they come from," senior-to-be Libero Lauren Mathewson said. "We've been learning something new everyday about each place we're going to visit."

During the past couple of weeks, each player was assigned a historical landmark or cultural element to research and present to the team after each practice. Mathewson's was the Buda Castle in Hungary.

K-State assistant coach Jeff Grove came up with the idea and had initially tried to get it approved for some academic credit, but when that fell through, decided to go forward with it anyway to add a learning and cultural component to the trip.

"I did the capital of Slovenia," sophomore outside hitter Kathleen Ludwig said. "It's kind of tough to pronounce a lot of things for me. I tried to get the translations for hello and goodbye and thank you. It kind of looks like a scrambled alphabet, but I tried my hardest.

"There are so many places in the world I know nothing about, so I'm just looking forward to actually seeing them and experiencing them in person."

On the volleyball side of things, the 10 days of practice allowed prior to the trip was something Fritz said became an extension of the spring workouts and could prove to be beneficial to a young team with just two seniors and one junior next season.

"I think it's been huge for us," she said. "I think we've gotten as much out of these 10 days as we got out — maybe not the entire spring — but we certainly got a lot of work done. It just allowed us to continue with some of the growth we saw this spring and now we get to go play five additional competitions."

With finals completed and the summer here, it's been nothing but volleyball for this group, free of other responsibilities that normally make for a challenging season.

"We come and play volleyball and we do it twice a day and don't have to worry about finals or papers," Fritz said. "School's a wonderful thing, of course, but at the same time it's difficult to have to be a student and play volleyball and have all those demands. There are just significantly less distractions right now — focusing 100 percent on volleyball."

As important as the Xs and Os are right now, so is developing team chemistry, while the majority of K-State's opponents have already broke campus for the summer.

"The chemistry is super important, the friendships," Ludwig said. "Every night we've been watching movies together or making dinner together and playing volleyball everyday. It's been nice to be able to put the school work aside for a while and cut out the stress some and spend time together and get closer as a team."

Developing that chemistry is something Fritz said is vital if K-State wants to move past its 12-18 overall record and 6-14 mark in the Big 12 last fall.

"Really good teams have that, they trust each other, they understand each other, they accept each other's differences and I think that's something young teams have to grow into," she said. "We're certainly a young team — two seniors, one junior and all the rest are freshmen and sophomores. They're still trying to figure each other out and I think this will certainly be an opportunity to help in that."