Athlete of the week - Stephanie McMahon

RIGHTSIDE HITTER Hometown: Manhattan Beach, CA Major: American Studies The best place to play beach volleyball: "My loyalties are without question to my hometown - Manhattan Beach all the way. Good surf and a beautiful beach." Why she loves Yale volleyball: "None of my teams ever in the past were so close. We're all on the same wavelength, we all have the same goals."

Manhattan Beach, Calif., a.k.a. Volleyball City, U.S.A., has been turning out national champion high school teams and professional players for years. Stephanie McMahon, TC '01, is one of the few athletes lucky to have been born in this volleyball mecca.

This season, she assumes sole command of the rightside hitter position, and, judging from her recent past, she's ready. Last season she played in 60 matches, sharing her position with another player, and still chalked up 117 kills and the same number of digs.

Alhough her goals for this year are to improve her hitting and blocking, according to former teammate Katharine Foster-Keddie, BR '99, now an assistant coach for the team, she has considerable talent in these two areas already. "Stephanie is an incredible blocker—she shuts down the opponent's best hitter," Foster-Keddie said. "That's her job. She's also a very strong hitter. She combines great consistency with incredible strength on the right side. Having that kind of stability and offense on the right side will be key to our success this year."

McMahon has been developing these skills over an unusually long career. "I started playing when I was 10 or 11, which is really young," she said. "Most kids in California start when they're around 14 years old."

Her high school and South Bay Club teams both played traditional indoor games. McMahon, however, also spent plenty of time in the sand playing the dramatically different game of beach volleyball, which generally involves only two players at a time. Now that she's on the East Coast, her viewpoint on the sport has changed.

"Volleyball was the central focus of everything in my town. Back here, it's not as stressed," McMahon said. "But I've definitely gained an appreciation of the game. My team plays because it loves to play. That definitely changed my perspective. A lot of people where I come from were like, `This sport is going to pay for your education, that's why you have to play.'"

Though her life is now quite centered around the volleyball team, she expects this phase to end when she graduates from Yale. "I would love to play volleyball after college, but there's not really a future," she explained. "I'm kind of ready to move on anyway but I have absolutely no idea what I'll do."

But before that time comes, McMahon has a much more immediate goal to achieve. "I'd like to win the Ivy Championships," she said. "That's what the whole season is about. The most important thing is the end-of-year tournament, which will be at Dartmouth this year." Judging by McMahon's talent, she's likely to make a number of good things happen along the road to Hanover as well.

Photo by John Yi.

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