Daniel Plahna '23 Recruiting Profile

           My first introduction to volleyball was in 8th grade. After playing basketball and baseball throughout my childhood but not finding the passion to continue in them, my friend said I should try out for the volleyball team with him, and I thought "Why not?" I went to try out for the team and found a group of varied boys and girls from 6th-8th grade playing on an outdoor net tied between two broken tree branches embedded in concrete-filled Home Depot buckets. We played for about an hour without any real direction other than one of the two coaches taking us aside to teach us how to serve. From there we were told that we all made the team and there wouldn't be any practices, only games. This didn't especially surprise me as our school didn't even have a gymnasium so I went with the flow and kept playing game after game with my only practice in between being playing at recess. I'm pretty sure we lost every game we played, but one game stands out to me. We were playing Forest Park Middle School, and there was one player on their team with a jump serve and a mustache. We probably didn't get more then 8 points in any set of that game, but I loved every second of it. That had to be the day I fell in love with volleyball. 

           Over the summer I didn't think especially much about volleyball other than playing in my back yard here or there and getting ready to try out for my high school team as a freshman the following year. To increase my chances of making the volleyball team, I started running cross country in the fall and fell in love with it as well, with my best time being a 24:02. Of course, my plan to try out for volleyball in the spring didn't go over well as the first day of tryouts was the first day we missed because of Covid. From there the time we were supposed to go back to school just kept getting pushed further and further back, and my itch to play volleyball more seriously was left unscratched. So to make myself feel better about missing the season, I would go outside about every day and hit a ball against my shed over and over. Having so little understanding of the game at the time, I would almost exclusively practice hitting, telling myself I would be able to hit consistently by the time tryouts came around in my sophomore year.  Alongside that I taught myself how to approach properly (almost) and how to jump serve (not at all at that point) by watching videos on YouTube. YouTube was an incredible resource to me, and watching tutorials on how to hit and set, alongside watching college games in archives, gave me the inspiration and excitement I needed to keep going out and playing every day, rain or shine. Alongside watching volleyball videos on YouTube, my boredom over quarantine brought me to watch a lot of engineering and coding videos by creators like Allan Pan, William Osman, and Michael Reeves.  I'd discovered my will to understand how anything and everything worked by watching these videos, and found myself disassembling (and often breaking) various things around my house. These two obsession like interests are probably what led me to have such a curiosity in physiology and biomedicine. I love learning how various systems work by themselves and with one another, and the human body is the most interesting system in the world, in my opinion. As more and more restrictions were lifted I got to run another very shortened season of cross country with only 3 meets, but still enough to keep me in shape. And finally after enduring online school for months, it was finally time for a delayed volleyball season. Tryouts were in mid May and I couldn't contain my excitement. For the entire week before tryouts I would bike to a grass hill by my house and sprint up it as many times as I could before biking back home. I told myself at the time I was doing this to get ready for tryouts, but I really think I just needed an outlet for my energy. 

           And finally the day had come. I walked into a 80+ degree gymnasium in a soon to be sweaty cloth mask and saw about 6 other people including both coaches. I expected numbers to be down because of Covid but that still surprised me. There were 2 returning players, an outside and a setter/outside that had both played club the previous year. Alongside them to form our team were no more than 5 first time players who barely understood how to rotate. But still, the coaches must have seen something in me (probably my 6 foot frame) and gave me special attention in teaching me how to approach and hit properly. While I still didn't quite have it down we went on to have a somewhat successful season that, looking back, felt a lot more like a JV season than the Varsity season it was supposed to be. As we played game after game and practiced every weekday that we weren't playing a game I fell deeper and deeper in love with the sport and could feel myself improving and learning more every day. About halfway through the season, the returning setter on my team, Isaiah, invited me to an open gym practice at the club he was playing at. He told me, "The people who play here are serious about volleyball; don't make a fool of yourself." Of course this terrified me, but it still made me feel special to be the only player on the team that he invited. After 2 hours of high pace and intense volleyball drills that started with an hour of defense (my least favorite at the time) I was feeling pretty disheartened. I knew I wasn't good enough to play with players of that caliber and for the rest of the season I didn't go back to the open gym. But after completing the season and losing in the first round of play offs, I had a fire in me. I wanted to get better. I didn't want to lose again. For the rest of the summer, I went to every open gym at the club. Week after week I would work on my jump serve, figure out how to hit higher, and make sure I could hold down the fort on defense. After these open gyms for the summer ended, I got in another season of cross country and my best one yet, running a 5k in 18:27. Immediately following cross country, it was time for Western Mass Volleyball's boys tryouts. 

           Recovering from Covid there was still limited coaching staff, so there would only be one team and they would perform at the highest level they could in tournaments. I knew I would have to perform my best to make this team, and luckily I did. Club season started with two practices a week and our first tournament about a month away. We had two solid Libero/DS's, two of the best opposites I've ever played with or against, the smartest setter I've ever seen by a mile, and a newer middle who had an advantage in being 6'5". Playing on this team was a blessing, and it helped me improve exponentially as a player. I found out very quickly where the holes in my play were and fixed them almost as quickly. I became significantly smarter as a player and my fundamentals improved by leaps and bounds. By the end of the season we had earned two gold medals and one silver in the tournaments we played. Only two days later it was time for high school tryouts in my junior year. 

           Being unmasked was a blessing, and unlike the year prior, when I walked into the gym, this time I saw upwards of 60 boys spread across 3 courts all at different levels. Being much more confident than last year, I performed well at tryouts and was confident I had a starting spot in the front row. When the first game came around I'm sure I would have started as an outside if I hadn't gotten Covid a few days before. I missed our first 4 games due to the extended leave and medical testing I had to get done to be cleared to play again. I came back swinging and got 11 kills in my first game back after not being able to play for 2+ weeks. I went on to face every game and practice that season like it was a playoff situation, because I knew how much I had already missed. I found myself being somewhat of a leader and teacher to the JV and freshman team players, and sometimes even to the players on my varsity team. My team continued to fight through our season up to our first state game, the first time any one on my team had played in states. We lost. My team had made it one stage further than last time, but we lost again in a first round. It won't happen again. The bitterness still hasn't fully left me and I don't expect it to for a long time. There were so many sets that were so close that I knew if I had made one less mistake we would have won. I won't lose in a first round again. I'm working with a more advanced club this summer, practicing with them 2 hours a week and weightlifting with them 1 hour a week. Alongside this I'm back to working day after day in my backyard, now more on defense and ball control than anything else. At the banquet for my last season, it was announced that one of my best friends, Younes, a libero, and I would be captains next year. 

           While volleyball still fills most of my time, I have picked up a couple more hobbies this summer. I bought a bass guitar recently that I'm teaching myself to play and very much enjoying. It sticks with the theme I have of playing the lower part in a song, as I play euphonium in my schools band. I've also started crocheting recently, inspired by it's popularity on TikTok and other socials. Right now I'm working on a baby blanket for my newborn cousin Aleia. I've found a good balance to my life, and I see volleyball being a major part of it for a very long time.