HONORING 30 YEARS OF SPU VOLLEYBALL
     Saturday vs. Western Oregon, 2:00 p.m.

Other 2015 Catching Up With profiles
        Gymnast-turned circus performer Kai Tindall (June 12)
        SPU's coaching dads (June 19)
        Basketball player and Utah women's coach Lynne Roberts (June 26)
        Rower and orthotics / prosthetics specialist Katie Degner (July 3)
        World-class goalkeeper Marcus Hahnemann (July 10) 
        New assistant volleyball coach Lindsey Wodrich (July 17)
        Tennis star Bob Thompson (July 24)
        3-time soccer champ / AT&T Mobility CEO Glenn Lurie (July 31)


By MARK MOSCHETTI
SPU Sports Information

SEATTLE – Ask Deri Kispert how much volleyball has changed in 30 years, and the first thing the former Seattle Pacific setter will do is point to her daughter.
 
"She's a setter, and I think she's better than me," Kispert said in reference to Casey, now a junior at King's High School in the north Seattle suburb of Shoreline. "She's jump-setting every ball; she's jump serving. A big part of that is that high school kids are almost without exception playing all year round."
 
That wasn't always the case 30 years ago when Kispert – then Deri Paulson – was approaching graduation at Selah High School, just outside of Yakima in south central Washington. She wanted to continue playing in college, and had gotten feelers from some of the Northwest teams.

 

Among those was one from coach JoAnn Atwell-Scriver, who was in the process of starting a brand-new program at Seattle Pacific.
               
"My older sister played for Whitworth, and her coach (Atwell-Scrivner) left Whitworth and came to SPU," she recalled. "I knew JoAnn, she was looking for a setter, and it all came together. I was keenly interested in majoring in business, and I heard SPU had a good business school.
 
"And I liked the idea of being in Seattle after growing up in Selah."
 
So in the summer of 1986, Deri came across the Cascades and joined eight other teammates in Brougham Pavilion to help serve up a big new part of the school's athletic program.
 
On Saturday afternoon when Western Oregon visits for a Great Northwest Athletic Conference match at 2:00 p.m., the 30th anniversary of the Seattle Pacific program will be recognized during the break between the second and third games.
 
"It makes me feel so old – I can't believe it," Kispert said of the three decades that have zipped past
 
AN EMOTIONAL, HUMBLE START
If Kispert was arriving at SPU today, she could walk into a dedicated volleyball locker room on the ground floor of Brougham.
 
They didn't have that in 1986. For that matter, they didn't even have holes drilled in the floor to put up the nets.
 
"I do remember the gym floor was being re-done – and it wasn't anywhere near done when practice started," Kispert recalled. "We would drive every day to the Northwest Center – that's where we would practice. Sometimes, the nets were set up; sometimes, they weren't. Or, we would go up to (now-closed) Queen Anne High School. Sometimes, the nets were set up; sometimes, they weren't."
 
That first ride heading away from campus to practice is still firmly entrenched in Kispert's mind all these years later.
 
"First day of my career, we got loaded up in the van, and said goodbye to our parents. Watching them drive away in the motorhome, they didn't lose it, but I totally lost it," Kispert acknowledged. "Everyone was kind of quiet and awkward. I just burst into tears and said, 'I miss my mom.' They all looked at me and didn't know what to do.
 
"Then they all started laughing, and we all sort of confessed how awkward it felt."
 
At that moment in time, it was just one of those things that made a first-year program feel like a first-year program.
 
But Kispert recalls other things that brought out other emotions.
 
"Everybody was so brand-new to it – no player had been there before," she said. "It wasn't like a freshman coming in and learning from upper-class players. Some had come to SPU from different colleges and had some college experience. Then there was this little crew of freshmen – Nancy Best and Lori Johnson, Heather Boles  … we just had a blast together."
 
BECAME THE MEASURING STICK
Those Falcons also won some matches – a dozen, to be precise, of the 37 they played during that inaugural season. That included the very first one in school history, a 3-0 sweep (15-3, 15-1, 15-12) against nearby Northwest College (now Northwest University, in Kirkland). They also split two matches with Whitworth, Atwell-Scrivner's former team, which still had Deri's older sister, Dana, as a hitter.
 
Kispert led the Falcons in assists that year with 599. Matter of fact, she led them in each of her four years, topped by the 1,251 she racked up as a junior in 1988, still the third-highest single-season total in SPU history. Her career total of 3,783 assists is No. 2 on the school list, exceed only by the 4,009 of Jenna Von Moos from 2003-06.
 
"Deri came in, and she worked and worked and worked," Atwell-Scrivner said. "The things we were asking her to do … think about how many times her hands touched the ball. If you look at the stats, she rarely came out of the match. She took it upon herself to be an integral part of the program."
 
Such an integral part that Atwell-Scrivner and her husband (and assistant coach) Rich often held her up as the standard.
 
"All the setters I've had have been the most amazingly hard workers in the world," she said. "But I just think Deri set a precedent that Rich and I look to all the time. … She was just tough. She never gave in at all, ever."
 
MORE THAN JUST VOLLEYBALL
Kispert went beyond just earning a place among SPU's all-time leaders on the volleyball court.
                         
She also earned two degrees – an undergrad in marketing, and a master's in business administration.
 
Even more important, she met the man who eventually would become her husband. That is Craig Kispert, now Seattle Pacific's Vice President for Business and Finance.
 
"I met him in the gym – he was a basketball player," she said. "He used to come down to the gym all the time. We started dating halfway through my freshman year and got married in 1990."

 

Deri was the Director of Human Resources at Seattle Pacific from 1995-99, leaving that spot when daughter Casey and twin brother Corey were born. (Older brother Calvin, now an SPU freshman, had come along in 1996.) Then in 2003, she became an assistant coach at King's.
 
"I hadn't had any contact with volleyball since SPU," Kispert said. "But (then-head coach Steve Bain) kept persisting. Two of my college teammates called me after I prayed about it and said, 'The Lord said this is what you need to do.'"
 
Kispert did – though she admits there was a bit of a learning curve at the time.
 
"The first day of practice, I was thrown out there to play because there weren't enough players, which I was happy to do," she said. "I jumped up and blocked a serve. Coach said, 'What are you doing? That has been out for 12 years.' The other thing was they had changed to rally scoring."
 
The coaching spot led to an opportunity at a King's teaching position, and Kispert has taught Bible classes to 11^th graders for the past eight years.
 
"Who's a Bible teacher with an MBA?" she asked, laughing. "But this is how God works. Volleyball was really the connection. … I had never had day-to-day interaction with 100 kids before."
 
With Casey playing for King's, Deri has stepped back from coaching, serving as the team chaplain instead.
 
"I kind of feel like she doesn't need another coach at home – she just needs a mom," Kispert said.
 
Kispert has kept tabs on the Falcons.
                           
"I've come to watch SPU over the years. I think they're more sophisticated now," she said in comparing more recent teams with those from earlier eras. "Setters are more active and hitters are more consistent.
 
"Volleyball has come a long way."
 
That it has. But after all – at least at Seattle Pacific …
 
… it has been 30 years.