Cardinal Take Sports Tradition The Extra Mile

Long before the bracket was revealed for the NCAA Volleyball Championships, we were pulling for a Stanford-Notre Dame final.

Just to see what kind of mischief the Stanford band could get into.

Lining up entertainment alternatives seemed prudent. Only one final in the previous 12 had stretched to five games. A year ago, the Cardinal allowed just 15 points in stoning Hawaii.

Seamus O’Hungry and the banned-in-South-Bend salute to the potato famine looked like good, clean fun by comparison.

Of course, we understood the Irish would be a long shot, but we figured it had to be Stanford and somebody.

Doesn’t Stanford win everything these days?

Tennis and swimming and cross country. Gymnastics and water polo.

The Sun Bowl. Anything Olympic.

The Masters.

And women’s volleyball. Again.

True, the most riveting moment Saturday was something the Cardinal did not win - a 44-minute fourth game which will endure as one of the most electric competitions ever staged inside the walls of the Spokane Arena. That moment, along with our admiration and gratitude, belonged to Penn State, which survived two match points to play on.

But the trophy goes home with Stanford, for the third time in four years and fourth in six.

Ho, ho, ho and hum? Hardly.

“This is by far the best championship I’ve been a part of,” said senior Kristin Folkl. “It was such a battle and the crowd was so into it, all-around it made it feel like it was a real special event.”

Surely it was the nearest college volleyball will get to that kind of heavyweight title fight feel. Stanford and Penn State were 1-2 in the preseason poll of coaches, but after dropping a pair of decisions to the Nittany Lions early on - with an injury-depleted lineup - the Cardinal lost almost all their electoral support.

Hmm. Wonder if those votes were convictions deeply felt, or just wishful thinking?

“Stanford’s hot right now,” acknowledged Penn State coach Russ Rose.

And he wasn’t just talking volleyball.

“I think there’s a great tradition that’s happening at Stanford across the board,” he said. “They’ve won the Sears Cup the last couple of years and excellence attracts excellence.

“In recruiting, I think we’re looking at Stanford choosing (athletes), not recruiting. And matches like this certainly don’t hurt what they’re doing.”

The Sears Cup is an all-sports trophy, recognizing broad-based excellence. As it happens, Stanford has won the last three - with a record point total last year, when the Cardinal won NCAA titles in six different sports and cracked the top 10 in eight others.

OK, so fencing was one of them. It’s not all tiddlywinks and tic-tac-toe. The football team swooned down the stretch this year, but it’s been in four bowl games in the 1990s. Both basketball teams are in the Top 25.

The traditional notion, of course, was that brain farms - like Stanford - would get their pocket protectors mutilated trying to compete consistently with the sweatshops of college athletics.

Instead, Stanford athletics is the hottest game around. Next to Riven, anyway.

So it was borderline hilarious to listen to Stanford athletic director Ted Leland insist that, “We struggle trying to balance academics and athletics, like all schools do.”

You bet, Ted. Like all schools. At Texas Tech, there are more ineligible athletes than eligible ones.

It’s a given that Stanford’s academic standards limit the available recruiting pool. But that very exclusivity, Leland acknowledged, makes the place more attractive to those who do qualify - and, apparently, more do every year.

“Our academic profile has turned into a positive,” he said. “Once they’re in our pool, we’re going to have a pretty good batting average with them.”

In fact, it’s an upset when the Cardinal doesn’t get them.

Leland’s example just happened to be a Spokane woman, distance runner Jessica Fry, who helped the Cardinal to an NCAA cross country title last year before sitting out this past fall with an injury.

“A great runner and a 4.0 student,” Leland pointed out. “And when she went to Alabama out of high school, we were flabbergasted. Now, of course, she’s transferred to our school - but we’ve got to get that kind of kid.”

They tend to get another kind, too. The versatile kind.

Folkl, of course, is almost as good at basketball as she is at volleyball - and she’s just the latest in a long line.

Chad Hutchinson, the current Stanford quarterback, has to wade through scout drool when he pitches for the baseball team - as did John Elway. James Lofton was world class in the long jump and at wide receiver.

And it’s not just the world class. A pair of Gonzaga Prep grads, Mark Machtolf and Justin Strand, dabbled in two sports at Stanford.

Indeed, the one player who may have been the key to Stanford’s victory this weekend wasn’t necessarily Folkl but unsung senior Paula McNamee. She had 20 kills on Saturday and was unstoppable in the first two games the Cardinal won.

Until this fall, she’d been a pine rider in two sports.

“Basketball was my first love, but I always thought volleyball was fun,” she said, “and it was a challenge to me because I hadn’t been playing it very long.”

McNamee learned her volleyball in San Diego, but moved to Maryland as a teenager and wound up at a small high school - Sidwell Friends - where everyone but her served underhand.

“Stanford’s a challenging institution overall and I think the people it draws in are overachievers in general,” McNamee reasoned. “If they feel they’re good in one sport, they might think, ‘Why not try another?’ “Maureen McLaren was a senior two years ago and she swam and played volleyball. She has like six (championship) rings. She won everything.”

True to her school.

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: Color Photo

The following fields overflowed: KEYWORD = NCAA WOMEN’S VOLLEYBALL CHAMPIONSHIP CREDIT = John Blanchette The Spokesman-Review