IVA days

By Ed Piper

When I was a 23-year-old sports editor of a weekday newspaper, I was able to rub elbows with and watch world-class volleyball players as they showed off their pinpoint setting ability lofting balls into overhanging basketball hoops in the gym they used for practice in Santa Barbara.

The days were 1977, and the International Volleyball Association (IVA), a pro league in the U.S. including international players, was in its short-lived heyday (1975-1980).

Stars like player/coach Bebeto, a setter from Brazil, hitter Jose Luis Garcia, from Sinaloa, Mexico, and Luis Eymard, another high-leaping hitter from Brazil led the roster of the Santa Barbara Spikers, who I was able to cover regularly.

Garcia, who powered 100-mph-plus spikes across the net, was a near national hero in his native Mexico. There were stories that boys and girls in his hometown jammed the local gym as they positioned themselves to retrieve his bazooka hits in workouts.

The IVA, which landed former Laker and 76er Wilt Chamberlain for one of its franchises, the Orange County Stars, employed the coed and novel configuration of men along the front line at the net, women on the back line defending. All 13 teams were based in cities in the western U.S.

Debbie Green was a defender the Spikers placed on the back line.

For the first time, I became aware of how popular volleyball was and is in Europe. There were some outstanding hitters from Poland, for instance.

All of this becomes a little more delectable in memory as one traces the ascending career of former Viking Madeleine Gates, who competed for three years as an undergrad at UCLA in 2016-17-18, and now is transferring to national champion Stanford for a fourth, graduate year without sitting out (having completed her Economics degree in three years).

I was thinking, Madeleine is going to Italy this summer with the U.S. National Team. What are the opportunities she will have in the future to play pro volleyball overseas?

In answer to a question about pro leagues in Europe, and whether the possibility of Madeleine playing abroad has come up in conversations at home, her mother, Amy Randel, replied: "Yes, there are pro leagues in Asia, Europe, and Brazil. And there has been mention of that."

My own international travel and living, though not as an elite athlete like Gates, didn't come until after I finished college. A year living and teaching in Mexico City, where I stumbled into playing for two men's basketball teams (one headed by the only woman coach in the league, Yula Moguel Viveros), followed immediately on my brother and me traveling through eight countries in western Europe (Serbia, Croatia, and the others were part of Yugoslavia--this was 1975) for a summer.

These experiences were exciting, and though it sounds trite, they broadened me as a person. I learned Spanish, which I did not speak before my travels (my teaching in Mexico City was in English). A language, in itself, carries the culture and thought patterns of a people group. Madeleine already speaks Spanish, having pursued that as a minor at UCLA.

Exciting times ahead for the high-leaping, hard-hitting, heavy-studying 6'3" middle, newly to be with the Cardinal after her sojourn to Naples July 4.