Tim Sullivan|Louisville Courier Journal
Anna Stevenson saved the day and prolonged the streak. She preserved Louisville’s unbeaten volleyball season with a thunderous kill and a clinching block, providing the last two points of Sunday’s five-set showdown against Pittsburgh.
“She is a machine who cannot be stopped,” tweeted teammate Amaya Tillman.
She is amachine who may still need to be convinced of her own merit.
Stevenson is one of those athletes who sometimes broods when she might bask, dwelling on mistakes others overlook. In the euphoric afterglow of U of L’s 20th victory of a spotless season —the second-ranked Cardinals outlasting a Pitt team with the nation’s No. 1 RPI rating —Duncan Hall texted his bride-to-be (without bias, he insisted) that she had dominated the match.
“Really???’” she responded. When Hall persisted with praise – “You are the best. You are my MVP.” —Stevenson replied, “I made way too many errors.”
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“She is definitely hard on herself,” Hall said.
“I used to be way worse,” Stevenson said. “I am still critical, but I think I’m better mentally and physically. Overanalyzing does not serve you well.”
Objective analysis would place Anna Stevenson among the top players in the nation. A second-team All-America selection last season, the graduate middle blocker currently ranks second among Louisville’s players in both kills and blocks and leads the Atlantic Coast Conference with a .450 hitting percentage, which is calculated by subtracting hitting errors from kills and then dividing by total attacks attempted.
That she was unable to maintain that standard against Pittsburgh with 13 kills and 5 errors in 28 total attacks (.286) speaks to the caliber of the competition,the magnitude of the match and helps explain why she was able to find so much fault amid her heroics.
“We are a great blocking team, but we hadn’t played a team thatfast,” Stevenson said. “I felt that was the hardest I’ve had to work in a game (and) I’m sure some of my teammates felt the same way. I think I got a little too excited at some points and made some mistakes, but overall I worked hard. I hit a ball in the net 'cause I got excited. I hit a ball out 'cause I got too excited.
“That’s something I’ve gotten way better at. If I got blocked in 2019, my next swing could have been an error and led to another error. Now, I just stay the course.”
U of L coach Dani Busboom Kelly says Stevenson was “just OK,’’ when she transferred to Louisville from Auburn prior to the 2019 season, but has since raised her game significantly and her vertical leap by five inches. At 6-foot-2, Stevenson’s reach now extends 10 feet and 10 inches from the floor and her grasp of the game, attention to detail and tendency to “geek out about new technique” bespeaks a future coach.
“Anna Stevenson is what we call a volleyball nerd,” Busboom Kelly said.
Hall, a pitcher on Louisville’s baseball team, says his fiancée will pull out her laptop and watch an entire match she has just finished before napping or showering. And then watch it all over again once the video has been coded.
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Theirs is a romance that began with his help on a homework assignment and blossomed when Hall appeared at a 2019 Halloween-week match dressed as Buddy from Will Ferrell’s Elf film.
“She might think I’m brave or attractive if I stick out,” Hall recalled. “What college guy is going to dress like an elf and go to a volleyball game? I was putting all my chips in one basket. Home run or strikeout.”
Before flinging souvenir balls into the crowd, Stevenson inscribed one with an exclamation from Elf —“Son of a Nutcracker” —and threw it to Hall. He followed up on her flirtation by asking her to autograph the ball afterward.
Soon after, they went on their first date. Last month, Hall proposed. They plan to chase her professional volleyball dream to Europe after their seasons end.
Here, the hypercritical Stevenson allows herself some hype.
“Yesterday we wrote out on things on the board —what we could accomplish,” she said Wednesday afternoon. “In my head, I wanted to write down that we literally could win a national championship... I thought that was a possibility last year. This year it really is.”
Whether Louisville volleyball is a machine that cannot be stopped has yet to be determined. But credit Anna Stevenson for keeping it rolling.
Tim Sullivan: 502-582-4650, tsullivan@courier-journal.com; Twitter: @TimSullivan714
