She’s A Cut Above

She is not the Albert Belle of volleyball by any stretch, but neither will Sarah Silvernail need to borrow Sally Field’s Oscar speech anytime soon.

Such are the revelations of the road.

It happened during warmups before Washington State’s match at Arizona last weekend. Silvernail rose and sent a routine blast over the net. The only return from Arizona was verbal.

“That all you got, Silvernail?”

Moments later, during introductions, Silvernail stepped out to acknowledge her name over the P.A. system. Across the way, the Arizona player with the rapier wit mimicked her wave.

Stunned, Silvernail turned to WSU teammate Stephanie Papke and asked, “Do people in the Pac-10 hate me?”

“Yes,” Papke answered, “they do.”

Hate?

Hate is pretty extreme. Dread, maybe. Dread works for Sarah Silvernail. If the opponent dreads her presence across the volleyball net - and a good many do - then the match may already be won.

But hate?

“I don’t understand it,” she said. “I don’t talk smack across the net. I don’t even look across the net …”

The protest tailed off into a laugh. The picnic flavor went out of college volleyball a long time ago. Strained relations, she admitted, are as much a part of the uniform as knee pads. You don’t win friends with high speed facials.

Every block is an affront. Every group high-five is a tacit taunt.

“You have rivals,” Silvernail conceded. “Kim Krull from UCLA I’ve hated her for three years. I don’t know why. Just because we play the same position. Barb Bell from Arizona - we would never look at each other when we’d shake hands. Never give each other the time of day. You don’t want the other person to know you know they even exist. The big mental game.

“But this is my last time through the Pac-10, and this time when we went through the lines afterward we actually made eye contact and said, ‘Good game.’ We’re finally that far with each other - but only because we don’t have to see each other again.”

The last last-time-through for Silvernail comes Friday, when the Cougars close out Pac-10 play against Washington at Bohler Gym.

And with all due respect to Corey Dillon and Ryan Leaf and the rest of the Apple Cup cast, there may be no more compelling a character in this week’s cross-state dramas than Silvernail.

She is the Pac-10 player of the year in deed and, in a few days, should be in fact. Washington State has never had one of those. She figures to be a first-team All-American, and the Cougars have never had one of those, either. Sometime after the first of the year, she’ll try out for the national team, and if she’s a decided long shot for that, then she is certainly this:

The best volleyball player her school has ever produced.

There’s little point cluttering this up with records. She is simply the trademark. She is Cougar volleyball’s Jack Thompson, its Jeanne Eggart, its John Olerud.

And that’s just as well because, as she so deftly put it, “I don’t deal well with not being the best at something.”

She couldn’t master snowboarding on her first try and it drove her to tears. She couldn’t master her big sister on the basketball court and it drove her to transfer.

Real deal.

Christine Silvernail, three years older than her sister, was a pretty fair hoopster. She played collegiately at Santa Clara and professionally in Europe, and as a teenager played hell with Sarah’s self-esteem. And for that, Cougar volleyball coach Cindy Fredrick owes Christine a bouquet, at the least.

“My sister and I hated each other growing up,” said Silvernail, a Spokane native who did her growing up in Yakima. “She would destroy me in every sport and I wanted to prove her wrong.

“I even transferred schools because I wanted to play varsity as a freshman, but I didn’t want to play with her. We played against each other in volleyball and I just kicked her butt, but on the basketball court it was another story. She’d say, ‘Uh, Sarah, you might want to try and front me the next time because I just burned you so bad and you look like an idiot.’ That’s one of the reasons I didn’t stick with basketball. She played circles around me and I never had any confidence. But volleyball was mine.”

The sisters Silvernail are now, according to Sarah, “the best of friends. We just never had any respect for each other until I got in college and I started realizing exactly what it took for her to get where she was - and when she realized I was actually going to be able to cut it.”

Something of an understatement, that.

Success has not come without its ordeals - the worst of which was a scary bout with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome brought on by overlapping sports and a perhaps hyperactive social life, wiping out her junior year of high school. Having led Eisenhower to a state championship as a sophomore, Silvernail moved to Fife for her senior year - to be closer to her doctors at the University of Washington Medical Center and to live with her father Chuck, who is the principal at Fife.

For the chronic fatigue, doctors prescribed Prozac, which allowed Sarah to sleep. Chuck Silvernail prescribed a curfew, which handled what the Prozac couldn’t. The thought of slowing down in sports apparently didn’t enter into the equation.

“I’d be the biggest outcast in my family if I didn’t play sports,” she said. “We’re big on genes. Wasting them isn’t an option.”

Though she never played club volleyball in the off-season, Silvernail’s talent was obvious enough for her to have her pick of colleges. Wazzu, she insisted, was a no-brainer.

“You don’t want to be in a women’s athletic program in a big city,” she said. “You won’t get any kind of support, any kind of coverage. No one cares about you. Pullman is the place to be, and you can ask anyone in the Pac-10. The support is so good, we’re spoiled rotten.”

The Cougars have done their best to reciprocate, but Silvernail believes a debt remains. Four times under Fredrick the Cougs have played in the NCAA Tournament - though never beyond the second round.

“I need this team to get further than other teams have here,” Silvernail said. “If I’m the backbone of this team, then I need to take us as far as we can go.”

It’s hard to fathom that’s as far as Silvernail and her teammates envision - but the Cougars have beaten their old nemesis Stanford this season, and the Cardinal beat top-ranked Hawaii and, well, you get the picture.

“It doesn’t make sense to some people,” said Silvernail. “Volleyball can be pretty cliquey. It’s like, ‘Who are these lame girls from Washington beating California girls?”’

Yep. They’ve got to hate that.

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: Color Photo

The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = John Blanchette The Spokesman-Review