Post by muoh61010 on Aug 24, 2007 13:21:47 GMT -5
sports.espn.go.com/ncaa/columns/story?columnist=voepel_mechelle&id=2987848&lpos=spotlight&lid=tab7pos1
LINCOLN, Neb. -- As sports nightmares go, this one was most exquisite in its potential agony.
On a hot August afternoon eight months after the fact, Nebraska volleyball star Sarah Pavan briefly relived it. She put herself back in the locker room in Florida on Dec. 9, 2006, her No. 1-seeded team down 2-0 to Minnesota in the regional final, a trip back "home" to the Final Four in Omaha, Neb., in dire jeopardy.
The daughter of two volleyball coaches, it's little surprise Sarah Pavan is a natural on the court.
That event had sold out months in advance in anticipation of the home-state Huskers playing for a national championship there. Pavan and every other Nebraska player had seen this in her dreams, both awake and asleep: a packed house pushing them all the way to the peak.
It was just supposed to happen. It was preordained, wasn't it? The brisk, biting chill of the Nebraska winter, the sparkling Christmas lights in the state's largest city, the thousands of people dressed in one color: red.
But here the Huskers were far from home, one game away from elimination. Would Omaha be forced to fake-smile through a party where the beloved guests of honor couldn't make it? Would the Huskers cry until their heads ached, wondering how they'd fallen short again, fly somberly back to campus and then do anything to avoid seeing or hearing about what was going on some 70 miles away?
That would have been a memory so jagged in its heartbreak that it could have torn Pavan to shreds again and again for years to come.
Melodramatic, you say? Not when you're the kind of person who by the age of 5 had plotted out her life in great detail -- "My parents would say I was an 'interesting' child," she says -- and had, up to that moment, come very close to living it exactly as planned.
This potential loss to Minnesota, however, was definitely not in the plan. Neither had been the regional final loss to Southern California her freshman year in 2004, when she'd played the match of her young career with 35 kills, but it hadn't been enough. She was inconsolable after that one, and some of her teammates didn't get it. Sure, they were all disappointed, but why was the kid so upset? She had three more years.
They didn't know the plan had been that she would win four NCAA championships.
Now, she could get "only" three titles.
But … it didn't happen in 2005, either, when Washington beat the favored Huskers in the NCAA final. Pavan was "on" that day and had wanted the ball again and again in that match. But she had stayed quiet and hadn't demanded it. There were fewer tears and more anger after that loss.
Because now, she could get "only" two titles.
Then in December 2006, even that wasn't looking good. The Gophers had done what their mascot does in real life: They were digging like crazy. Even the cannon shots from Pavan's left arm were having a hard time finding the floor.
"It was just exasperating, because I didn't know what was going wrong," Pavan recalled of sitting in that locker room with everyone trying to ignore the desperation in the air. "But it was just a matter of, 'Do you want your season to end like this? Do you want to end your junior year playing so awful and not helping your team at all?'"
You probably know or have guessed by now that didn't happen. But for just a few moments, let's leave you with that image right on the edge: Sarah Pavan, perfectionist to the extreme, wondering if her entire plan was going haywire.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
It would be fun if they considered altering the name of the school/state just for the fall semester. Change one letter.
That way, a headline might read, "Canada's Sarah Pavan and Nabraska Stand Tall" -- with no other vowels except A. Exactly like what you'll always see on Pavan's report card.
She is a 4.0 student majoring in biochemistry. So is she one of those people who truly enjoys the A's? Or is it more that she's pathologically afraid of the letter B ever showing up?
"When I take a really difficult class and get an A, I'm very satisfied," Pavan said. "But if I don't think it's that difficult, I think that an A is just what I'm supposed to do. I do want to be perfect, and it's almost to a fault."
Nebraska's John Cook said he has learned a lot about coaching from Sarah Pavan.
Yeah, right. Almost?
"I would love to write a book some day: 'Coaching a Perfectionist,'" Nebraska's John Cook said. "I've had to learn a lot about coaching that type of athlete. Sarah's not the only one on our team with that personality, but she's definitely the extreme. She's actually taught us a lot about coaching."
Cook had won a very tough and emotional recruiting battle for the 6-foot-5 Pavan, edging out Minnesota, which almost snared her. Pavan's parents, Paul and Cindy, are both volleyball coaches, and so she had lots of practical advice on making the big decision. She opted for Nebraska, and thought Lincoln was similar to her hometown of Kitchener, Ontario.
And it was, except …
"My first couple of years were really hard," Pavan said. "For a lot of that time, I wanted to go home about every day. I didn't think this place was for me."
One of her main lifelines, though, was her dad, who up until college had coached Sarah her entire career. He knew what to say, and even when it didn't seem like it helped, it really did.
Part of the problem was Pavan's "it-has-to-be-100-percent-right" nature. "Perfectionist" has become a term too loosely used. But if there were a kind of official certification for a true perfectionist's club -- no poseurs -- Pavan long ago would have been issued her lifetime membership card.
"It's a constant battle just making her understand that you're going to make errors, everybody's going to make them," Paul Pavan said. "The greatest players in the world make errors. She has learned to have the ability to put it aside. But afterward, she does dwell on it."
Pavan explains she is stubborn about dealing with matches in which she doesn't think she was up to par: "It does take me a long time. People can tell me all they want to ease up, and, honestly, I don't listen. But eventually, I come to terms with it. I don't like to be forced."
It's a big issue in her life outside of volleyball, too.
"I think I've realized there are certain things I won't be able to do for my career, just based on my personality," Pavan said. "I remember when I said I wanted to be a pediatrician, my dad said, 'What are you going to do when a baby has cancer, and you can't necessarily cure it?' And I was like, 'Crap, I don't know!'"
Because her plan has never included not being perfect.
Pavan's struggles in her first two seasons, though, weren't just about obsessing over perfection. They were also about her isolation from people, including her teammates, who could misinterpret her contemplative silences and naturally somber expression for arrogance.
"She's like her mother -- very quiet, doesn't waste a lot of words," Paul Pavan said. "They are very reserved people who keep to themselves."
Which is hard when you're one of the most recognizable athletes on your campus. Pavan has had to balance her athletic fame with her reticent nature. Suffice to say she doesn't "manufacture" smiles for the sake of social utility on or off the court. But …
"It's really hard to get across that, 'Yes, I'm quiet and really a perfectionist,' but that doesn't mean I'm snobby or think I'm better than anyone else," she said. "But people often get that impression of me."
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
OK, now it's time to return to the locker room in Florida in December, with the Huskers trailing 2-0. Nebraska had never come back from that kind of deficit in the history of the NCAA Tournament.
Cook didn't give a fire-and-brimstone speech.
Sarah Pavan has a chance to end her career with two NCAA titles in 2007.
"I knew at that point, ranting and raving wasn't going to help the situation," he said. "We were tight and pressing; we were so close to getting to Omaha. It's almost like I went the opposite way."
As calmly as possible, he reminded the Huskers of their game plan. He talked about everything they'd done to get ready for this moment. Pavan listened, of course, but something else was going through her head.
She recalled that Minnesota -- the team about to "ruin" her plan -- had been her college runner-up.
"I do remember thinking, 'I could have gone to this school -- these were my last two choices," Pavan said. "And I want to prove why I chose Nebraska."
Pavan led the charge back against the Gophers. The Huskers won the third game 30-20. They took the fourth 30-25. Nebraska fans finally started to exhale. Then it went into the deciding fifth game, and by that juncture Pavan had fully found her rhythm.
"For me, when the game is on the line, I want to be the one my team trusts," she said. "I love competition more than anything, and when a game is really tight, that's when I'm at my best. I'm going to go out swinging as hard as I can."
Teammate Christina Houghtelling, sidelined by shoulder surgery in 2006 but back now for a final season, had been national player of the year in 2005. She watched Pavan elevate to that status last year.
"She's one of those players who demands the ball," Houghtelling said. "She's very confident, and setters respect that. When you have a teammate that knows that she's going to get that next point for your team, there's just a lot of trust. She did a great job of embracing that.
"A lot of teams are going to focus on her -- get double or triple blocks. She handled that. Her defense improved. And her ability to hit more shots -- not that she didn't have enough already -- and hit edges of the court improved. I think she still has higher levels in her. She's an amazing player."
Pavan had 15 kills in the final three games of the match against the Gophers, including the clinching point that sent the team to the Final Four.
"I've played with pressure my entire life; it's something I thrive on," she said. "But I honestly don't know what caused the turnaround. I guess inside me, I knew I didn't want it to end."
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Actually, it did have to end, but in a place and time that satisfied the perfectionist. The Huskers won the NCAA title, beating UCLA and Stanford in front of record crowds at the Qwest Center.
That's the same place they will open the 2007 season Friday, as the preseason No. 1-ranked team, looking to repeat. Pavan cleaned up on the hardware for her junior season. She was the Final Four's most valuable player, AVCA National Player of the Year, Big 12 Female Athlete of the Year, ESPN the Magazine Academic All-American of the Year and the Honda-Broderick Cup winner for top collegiate female athlete.
"I tell her as far as this season, she doesn't have to live up to this monster she's created," Paul Pavan said of Sarah's expectations. "She just has to do one thing, and that's help her team win the national championship again."
Cook takes stock before Pavan begins her last year in Huskers red.
"When she received the Honda-Broderick award -- the speech that she gave was, to me, the symbol of all of the maturity that's happened over the last three years," he said. "From starting as a homesick freshman crying every day who couldn't carry on a conversation to getting up at Columbia Law Library this summer and giving the speech she gave.
"And then when we got back to Lincoln, we had a press conference. She said something really interesting. She said, 'Nebraska is my home now.'"
Maybe that wasn't exactly in the plan. But even Sarah Pavan couldn't know absolutely everything when she was 5.
LINCOLN, Neb. -- As sports nightmares go, this one was most exquisite in its potential agony.
On a hot August afternoon eight months after the fact, Nebraska volleyball star Sarah Pavan briefly relived it. She put herself back in the locker room in Florida on Dec. 9, 2006, her No. 1-seeded team down 2-0 to Minnesota in the regional final, a trip back "home" to the Final Four in Omaha, Neb., in dire jeopardy.
The daughter of two volleyball coaches, it's little surprise Sarah Pavan is a natural on the court.
That event had sold out months in advance in anticipation of the home-state Huskers playing for a national championship there. Pavan and every other Nebraska player had seen this in her dreams, both awake and asleep: a packed house pushing them all the way to the peak.
It was just supposed to happen. It was preordained, wasn't it? The brisk, biting chill of the Nebraska winter, the sparkling Christmas lights in the state's largest city, the thousands of people dressed in one color: red.
But here the Huskers were far from home, one game away from elimination. Would Omaha be forced to fake-smile through a party where the beloved guests of honor couldn't make it? Would the Huskers cry until their heads ached, wondering how they'd fallen short again, fly somberly back to campus and then do anything to avoid seeing or hearing about what was going on some 70 miles away?
That would have been a memory so jagged in its heartbreak that it could have torn Pavan to shreds again and again for years to come.
Melodramatic, you say? Not when you're the kind of person who by the age of 5 had plotted out her life in great detail -- "My parents would say I was an 'interesting' child," she says -- and had, up to that moment, come very close to living it exactly as planned.
This potential loss to Minnesota, however, was definitely not in the plan. Neither had been the regional final loss to Southern California her freshman year in 2004, when she'd played the match of her young career with 35 kills, but it hadn't been enough. She was inconsolable after that one, and some of her teammates didn't get it. Sure, they were all disappointed, but why was the kid so upset? She had three more years.
They didn't know the plan had been that she would win four NCAA championships.
Now, she could get "only" three titles.
But … it didn't happen in 2005, either, when Washington beat the favored Huskers in the NCAA final. Pavan was "on" that day and had wanted the ball again and again in that match. But she had stayed quiet and hadn't demanded it. There were fewer tears and more anger after that loss.
Because now, she could get "only" two titles.
Then in December 2006, even that wasn't looking good. The Gophers had done what their mascot does in real life: They were digging like crazy. Even the cannon shots from Pavan's left arm were having a hard time finding the floor.
"It was just exasperating, because I didn't know what was going wrong," Pavan recalled of sitting in that locker room with everyone trying to ignore the desperation in the air. "But it was just a matter of, 'Do you want your season to end like this? Do you want to end your junior year playing so awful and not helping your team at all?'"
You probably know or have guessed by now that didn't happen. But for just a few moments, let's leave you with that image right on the edge: Sarah Pavan, perfectionist to the extreme, wondering if her entire plan was going haywire.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
It would be fun if they considered altering the name of the school/state just for the fall semester. Change one letter.
That way, a headline might read, "Canada's Sarah Pavan and Nabraska Stand Tall" -- with no other vowels except A. Exactly like what you'll always see on Pavan's report card.
She is a 4.0 student majoring in biochemistry. So is she one of those people who truly enjoys the A's? Or is it more that she's pathologically afraid of the letter B ever showing up?
"When I take a really difficult class and get an A, I'm very satisfied," Pavan said. "But if I don't think it's that difficult, I think that an A is just what I'm supposed to do. I do want to be perfect, and it's almost to a fault."
Nebraska's John Cook said he has learned a lot about coaching from Sarah Pavan.
Yeah, right. Almost?
"I would love to write a book some day: 'Coaching a Perfectionist,'" Nebraska's John Cook said. "I've had to learn a lot about coaching that type of athlete. Sarah's not the only one on our team with that personality, but she's definitely the extreme. She's actually taught us a lot about coaching."
Cook had won a very tough and emotional recruiting battle for the 6-foot-5 Pavan, edging out Minnesota, which almost snared her. Pavan's parents, Paul and Cindy, are both volleyball coaches, and so she had lots of practical advice on making the big decision. She opted for Nebraska, and thought Lincoln was similar to her hometown of Kitchener, Ontario.
And it was, except …
"My first couple of years were really hard," Pavan said. "For a lot of that time, I wanted to go home about every day. I didn't think this place was for me."
One of her main lifelines, though, was her dad, who up until college had coached Sarah her entire career. He knew what to say, and even when it didn't seem like it helped, it really did.
Part of the problem was Pavan's "it-has-to-be-100-percent-right" nature. "Perfectionist" has become a term too loosely used. But if there were a kind of official certification for a true perfectionist's club -- no poseurs -- Pavan long ago would have been issued her lifetime membership card.
"It's a constant battle just making her understand that you're going to make errors, everybody's going to make them," Paul Pavan said. "The greatest players in the world make errors. She has learned to have the ability to put it aside. But afterward, she does dwell on it."
Pavan explains she is stubborn about dealing with matches in which she doesn't think she was up to par: "It does take me a long time. People can tell me all they want to ease up, and, honestly, I don't listen. But eventually, I come to terms with it. I don't like to be forced."
It's a big issue in her life outside of volleyball, too.
"I think I've realized there are certain things I won't be able to do for my career, just based on my personality," Pavan said. "I remember when I said I wanted to be a pediatrician, my dad said, 'What are you going to do when a baby has cancer, and you can't necessarily cure it?' And I was like, 'Crap, I don't know!'"
Because her plan has never included not being perfect.
Pavan's struggles in her first two seasons, though, weren't just about obsessing over perfection. They were also about her isolation from people, including her teammates, who could misinterpret her contemplative silences and naturally somber expression for arrogance.
"She's like her mother -- very quiet, doesn't waste a lot of words," Paul Pavan said. "They are very reserved people who keep to themselves."
Which is hard when you're one of the most recognizable athletes on your campus. Pavan has had to balance her athletic fame with her reticent nature. Suffice to say she doesn't "manufacture" smiles for the sake of social utility on or off the court. But …
"It's really hard to get across that, 'Yes, I'm quiet and really a perfectionist,' but that doesn't mean I'm snobby or think I'm better than anyone else," she said. "But people often get that impression of me."
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
OK, now it's time to return to the locker room in Florida in December, with the Huskers trailing 2-0. Nebraska had never come back from that kind of deficit in the history of the NCAA Tournament.
Cook didn't give a fire-and-brimstone speech.
Sarah Pavan has a chance to end her career with two NCAA titles in 2007.
"I knew at that point, ranting and raving wasn't going to help the situation," he said. "We were tight and pressing; we were so close to getting to Omaha. It's almost like I went the opposite way."
As calmly as possible, he reminded the Huskers of their game plan. He talked about everything they'd done to get ready for this moment. Pavan listened, of course, but something else was going through her head.
She recalled that Minnesota -- the team about to "ruin" her plan -- had been her college runner-up.
"I do remember thinking, 'I could have gone to this school -- these were my last two choices," Pavan said. "And I want to prove why I chose Nebraska."
Pavan led the charge back against the Gophers. The Huskers won the third game 30-20. They took the fourth 30-25. Nebraska fans finally started to exhale. Then it went into the deciding fifth game, and by that juncture Pavan had fully found her rhythm.
"For me, when the game is on the line, I want to be the one my team trusts," she said. "I love competition more than anything, and when a game is really tight, that's when I'm at my best. I'm going to go out swinging as hard as I can."
Teammate Christina Houghtelling, sidelined by shoulder surgery in 2006 but back now for a final season, had been national player of the year in 2005. She watched Pavan elevate to that status last year.
"She's one of those players who demands the ball," Houghtelling said. "She's very confident, and setters respect that. When you have a teammate that knows that she's going to get that next point for your team, there's just a lot of trust. She did a great job of embracing that.
"A lot of teams are going to focus on her -- get double or triple blocks. She handled that. Her defense improved. And her ability to hit more shots -- not that she didn't have enough already -- and hit edges of the court improved. I think she still has higher levels in her. She's an amazing player."
Pavan had 15 kills in the final three games of the match against the Gophers, including the clinching point that sent the team to the Final Four.
"I've played with pressure my entire life; it's something I thrive on," she said. "But I honestly don't know what caused the turnaround. I guess inside me, I knew I didn't want it to end."
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Actually, it did have to end, but in a place and time that satisfied the perfectionist. The Huskers won the NCAA title, beating UCLA and Stanford in front of record crowds at the Qwest Center.
That's the same place they will open the 2007 season Friday, as the preseason No. 1-ranked team, looking to repeat. Pavan cleaned up on the hardware for her junior season. She was the Final Four's most valuable player, AVCA National Player of the Year, Big 12 Female Athlete of the Year, ESPN the Magazine Academic All-American of the Year and the Honda-Broderick Cup winner for top collegiate female athlete.
"I tell her as far as this season, she doesn't have to live up to this monster she's created," Paul Pavan said of Sarah's expectations. "She just has to do one thing, and that's help her team win the national championship again."
Cook takes stock before Pavan begins her last year in Huskers red.
"When she received the Honda-Broderick award -- the speech that she gave was, to me, the symbol of all of the maturity that's happened over the last three years," he said. "From starting as a homesick freshman crying every day who couldn't carry on a conversation to getting up at Columbia Law Library this summer and giving the speech she gave.
"And then when we got back to Lincoln, we had a press conference. She said something really interesting. She said, 'Nebraska is my home now.'"
Maybe that wasn't exactly in the plan. But even Sarah Pavan couldn't know absolutely everything when she was 5.
