EVERETT — Their bodies are infuriatingly perfect and many earn well into six figures a year by playing a game most of us play at family-reunion picnics.
Yet, most on the AVP Hot Winter Nights Tour, which made its first-ever stop at Comcast Arena at the Everett Events Center on Thursday night, turn to each other for the basics, such as companionship and even family.
Take star player Casey Jennings, who is one of the lucky ones. Married to Olympic gold medalist and women’s volleyball icon Kerri Walsh, Jennings can bury his very soul into the game he loves because, well, so does everyone he hangs with.
“The social life is really good, because all my friends do what I do,” said Jennings, 32, who won the 1999 NCAA Championship at Brigham Young University. “The announcer, the crew, all these people are my family. We travel together.”
The Hot Winter Nights Tour is considered the offseason for most of the players, who play in the AVP Crocs tour in the summer and train most of the rest of the year for international competition, including the Olympics.
Jennifer Boss is the other end of the spectrum. Having turned 30 in July, she and husband Aaron spend much of the year apart. The saving grace: Aaron Boss is a former pro beach volleyball standout himself and knows what the life demands.
“We’d met on tour,” Jennifer Boss said. “He played for 13 years. He knows how it is. When I get home and I’m tired, he gets it. He doesn’t expect me to want to go out for dinner. He knows when I want to just be home and be a family.”
The Hot Winter Nights Tour makes up only a fraction of the time the players dedicate to the game. It fills in what formerly was free time, or as much free time as it gets. Were it not for the winter tour, this would be the time for hard-core training. Most agree that playing beats training, but it’s time away for many, nonetheless.
“I came back from an international tour in November,” said Jennifer Boss, former star at USC. “I have two weeks free in November, I have December and that’s it. So, when people say, ‘Oh, don’t you just play in the summer?’ Oh, no. It’s a full-time job.”
Star player Mike Lambert knows it well.
Known as the “Hawaiian Curtain,” Lambert, 33, had a dream season in 2004, when he was named the AVP Best Offensive Player, Most Valuable Player and was part of the AVP Team of the Year.
A three-time All-America at Stanford, he led the Cardinal to the 1997 NCAA Championship. He was an Olympian in 1996 and 2000.
Nice life, eh?
Sure, until you consider that his wife, Deborah, and two infant children remain in Costa Mesa, Calif., as he plays.
“It’s hard,” Lambert said. “We try to make it up in the offseason, when I try to be home all the time.”
Players April Ross and Brad Keenan are lucky. Appropriately, they got to spend Valentine’s Day together. The tour makes the effort so that they may travel together to help the relationship avoid as many speed bumps as possible.
“I know it’s hard for a lot of players because they have to leave their husbands and wives and babies at home,” said Ross, a former Pac-10 Player of the Year who led USC to back-to-back NCAA Championships in 2002 and 2003. “They try to keep us on the same trips. It’s awesome. We’re gone half the year, at least.”
They may play volleyball, but to most of these athletes, it’s anything but a picnic.
Sports columnist John Sleeper: sleeper@heraldnet.com. For Sleeper[`]s blog, “Dangling Participles,” go to www.heraldnet.com/danglingparticiples.
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