It’s all about family for the Arizona Wildcats volleyball team. Their family members on the court. Their family members at home. Their family members that have passed on. They have one more chance to play for family when they face Bowling Green in the championship game of the NIVC on Tuesday evening.
“There’s a lot of saying that your team is your family, but here I’ve really felt my team is my family, being really far from home,” said freshman setter Avery Scoggins. “I was just reflecting on I get to go home on Wednesday, and I just am sad to leave here just as much as I was to leave home, just because I’ve grown so close to these girls, and I really just love them so much, and playing with them has been so much fun. So I think the culture, everybody trusts each other, everybody is close with everybody. There’s no cliques, there’s no groups. Nobody’s mean to one another, rarely, and it’s fun. It’s like home.”
Scoggins came to volleyball by way of her family, but they have let her go her own way.
“My mom and my aunt didn’t really help a lot during the recruiting process,” Scoggins said. “That was kind of all me, but I was always growing up around volleyball, and my aunt played volleyball at Nebraska and my mom played at Georgia…It was just nice because it was relatable to have someone in the family that has played it. A lot of my friends growing up, they didn’t really have (that). Their mom didn’t really play volleyball, or they didn’t really have a volleyball family. So I was really lucky, I think, just being able to grow up around it, and they can just give knowledge to it, about it just was so nice, especially having a setter in the family.”
Ultimately, though, Scoggins just wanted “my mom to be my mom” instead of coaching her from the stands.
“She coached me my 12 year when I first started playing, and once I wasn’t coached by her anymore, I kind of tried to not let her coach me,” Scoggins said.
Her coach sees the impact of growing up the daughter of a player and a coach, though. Scoggins is just one of her players that she sees it in.
“She knows how to operate in a gym, and she knows when she’s actually doing her job and not doing her job, because her mom will always stay on her, as well as her dad,” Arizona head coach Rita Stubbs said. “But it is as comforting you get individuals that understand the ins and outs and that kind of understand the coach’s mindset. That was one of the things with Ava Tortorello which was good about her. She goes, ‘I get it. I get the coach’s mindset.’ Whereas the average player who doesn’t have a parent who played a sport or was actually a coach, they don’t tend to understand this quickly.”
Stubbs is also drawing on family this season. In her case, it’s family that she lost this year.
Stubbs came into the press conference with her hair dyed blue. She has dyed it red on several occasions the past two years, but this was the first time for the blue tint.
“My brother passed away in May, and blue is his favorite color,” Stubbs said. “And he left me with some choice words for this particular season, and this is the only way I could have him with me. Well, basically, he got on me from my time at NC State and saying that I didn’t allow myself to be who I am. And he goes, ‘Rita, you have to show them who you are. Be you. Don’t change no matter what happens. You just have to be that person that people want to listen to and talk to,’ with a lot of other choice words. ‘You don’t get to do this again. This is it. You got to go out there and show them what you’re made of.’”
Charles Johnson was the person Stubbs was closest to in her family. Her father was murdered when she was 10 years old. She was estranged from her mother, who Stubbs said was addicted to drugs until the day she died.
“Charles and Charita,” she said.
She has related that when she first left Arizona to play professionally in France, her brother gave her a Bible. While Stubbs is an extremely religious woman now, she wasn’t at the time. She didn’t open the book for months. When she finally did, she found he had put $200 in it.
She has also drawn from her Arizona Athletics family. Women’s basketball head coach Adia Barnes used a WNIT championship run to raise her program to new heights in 2019.
“‘Go get it, Rita. Prove them wrong,’” was Barnes’ general message according to Stubbs. “You know Adia. She has better choice words than I do. But in true Adia form.”
The family bonds have taken Arizona to this final game of the season. It allowed them to stick together when things got tough. When Big 12 play started, the Wildcats faced a string of ranked teams. After winning 11 games against a soft nonconference slate, they went 2-9 to start Big 12 play.
Then, they pulled together. A team meeting after they lost to Kansas State was one motivating factor. Stubbs, who was sick at the time, left very quickly after the match. She was gone by the time the media and support staff got to the locker room.
The players stayed behind for 30 minutes and worked out what they were going to do to turn things around. They have not lost again since that day. In the next match, they started their current 10-match winning streak with a win over then-No. 8 Kansas.
Now, they face a Bowling Green team that doesn’t say “quit.” The Falcons have come back in three of their four matches in the NIVC. Their last match was a reverse sweep on the road at St. John’s.
“I’m excited they never give up, because we’re learning to be that same type of team that will compete the entire time,” Stubbs said. “And I think that playing a team like that at the very end is exactly what we need to be able to finish off the season so that we put ourselves in a position where we’re like, we can beat any team.”
For Scoggins, it’s all a new experience that she wants to end on a high note for both the players who return and the players who will play their final match in McKale Center.
“I’ve never played in any college tournament before, so even though this isn’t the NCAA tournament, it’s still the NIVC and I still really, really want to win,” Scoggins said.
Lead photo by Mike Christy / Arizona Athletics