On her first day of volleyball practice, Amber Witherspoon watched her teammates run through a spiking drill. She couldn’t do it. Throughout 2015, she spent time alone working on a personal net that head coach Leonid Yelin set up as she tried to catch up to the rest of the team.

“I would just hit all practice for hours … I think he would forget about the time,” Witherspoon said. “I would work with our senior Gosia (Wlaszczuk), just working on hitting with her every day.”

Witherspoon, a junior, is entering her second season since switching from Syracuse’s women’s basketball team to volleyball, and is now in a position that feels right for her. The adjustment didn’t come easy and playing time was sparse in her first year, but the arduous training through fall of 2015 has paid off with heavy involvement in the team’s rotation this season.

Through four games, Amber Witherspoon has started each contest and leads her team with six solo blocks. It’s been a long time coming, but she has finally found a home for herself on Syracuse’s middle block.

Wlaszczuk is gone now, beginning her own coaching career, and so is the entirety of last year’s senior class. In 365 days, Witherspoon went from the new woman in the building to one of just three Syracuse juniors. Her goal is to always go up aggressively to hit the ball, something teammate Jalissa Trotter has said the Orange needs more of — a fearlessness on the court.

“I just wanted to spend some time because I knew she needed it,” Wlaszczuk said. “She was a great person to work with because she listens so much and she did everything like she wanted to do it, not like she had to, she wanted to do it and that’s a big change. She listened and followed instructions even though there wasn’t always an improvement from day to day.”

The spare playing time was a blessing in disguise for Witherspoon. Rather than being thrown into high-stakes conference games, she was able to pick up her true passion once again. Basketball was where she originally had the chance to get into Syracuse on scholarship and pursue her dream of college athletics, but her desire to play volleyball never dwindled after playing the sport in high school.

During the recruiting process, Yelin noticed Witherspoon late and kept tabs on her throughout her freshman year. After averaging less than a point in five minutes per game as a third-string freshman center on the basketball team, “she made her decision to approach us and play volleyball,” Yelin said, “it was very easy for us.”

Despite some of her early limitations, the team saw the physical strengths she exhibited. At 6-foot-4, she was immediately among Syracuse’s tallest players, her leaping ability was well known as someone who could dunk in high school and her self-awareness about where her game was at stuck out.

“As much as we wanted to be good teammates, and we were, it was hard,” Wlaszczuk said. “… she knew where she was … she knew that she was way behind everyone else and she never used it as an excuse.”

Though Witherspoon has less on-court responsibilities than other players as a middle blocker, Yelin said, the transition wasn’t easy.

“What she’s achieved in this short time is incredible,” Yelin said.

Published on September 6, 2016 at 12:30 am

Contact Bobby: rpmannin@syr.edu