FREY EMERGES AS A THREAT FOR VCU ON AND OFF THE FLOOR
By Chris Kowalczyk
10-26-09

The coaches and staffers who work in the VCU Sports Medicine Building are familiar with the grating, metal-on-blacktop sound of the weight sled. Year ‘round, Rams’ athletes can be found dragging the primitive, yet highly effective, apparatus back and forth across the Sports Med parking lot. Despite the basic premise, the exercise builds powerful athletes, and is a stable of the Rams’ strength and conditioning programs.

So VCU Head Volleyball Coach James Finley wasn’t surprised to see an impressive, albeit unfamiliar athlete pulling the contraption when he returned to his office in mid-July.

“I had been at nationals and doing camps and recruiting and I hadn’t been around campus much,” Finley said. “Coach [Nathan] Baker and I were walking out the back of Sports Med and there was this girl pulling the weight sled, and it was just the ‘V’ shape and everything else, and we wondered, ‘when did track get a kid like that?’”

But it wasn’t a hot shot track and field recruit, it was Finley’s own player, rising junior Mariel Frey.

“You could tell that she had put in a couple of months work,” Finley said. “She was so chiseled and her shoulders were bigger and broader. It was a really big change from even the spring.”

Clearly, those sessions in the weight room and the days mushing across the parking lot in the middle of the summer have paid off.

After two pedestrian seasons as a collegian, Frey has emerged as one of the stars of this year’s 17-8 VCU Volleyball team. Through 25 matches, Frey, a native of Lititz, Pa., leads the team in kills per set (2.60) and points (297.0).

A major factor in her success this season was her decision to spend the summer in Richmond for the first time. In addition to taking classes, Frey and teammate Alyssa Foster, a Richmond native, spent hours working with VCU Strength and Conditioning Coordinator Tim Kontos. The change helped Frey get in the best shape of her career.

“I liked [staying all summer], because I could just come and work out with Tim Kontos, instead of trying to get around to doing it at home, which has always been hard on break,” Frey said. “At home, we don’t really belong to a gym that has everything I need.”

Frey also says that she’s working smarter these days, and not just harder. After battling chronic back pain for two seasons, Kontos has adjusted Frey’s routine to keep her injury-free.  Gone are the Olympic lifts, the squats, the cleans and the snatches. They’ve been replaced with alternative exercises that work the same muscle groups, but don’t require the same brute force.

“He’s been trying to change my workout so that it’s helping me and not hurting me,” Frey said. “I think he’s doing a really good job of that. Before, I was pushing myself really hard even if I had a lot of pain. Now I’m just crossing out anything that’s hurting me and it’s helping because I’m not hurting during practice and games.”

POSITION OF STRENGTH
Frey’s work in the weight room isn’t the only reason for her emergence this season.  This year she’s moved to outside hitter after playing middle blocker and right side during her freshman and sophomore seasons. 

Although she was a middle blocker in high school, at 5-foot-11, Frey is considered short for that position at the college level.

“When we recruited Mariel, we didn’t think that she would stay in the middle,” Finley said. “We thought that she had a decent platform, and felt like we could develop the ball control side of her game in a relatively short period of time.”

After playing a mix of right side and outside hitter last year, Frey moved to the outside full time during spring practice, where she could get literally thousands of repetitions.

“I thought she did a really good job, because she’s so coachable,” Finley said. “She just worked and worked and worked every day to do the reps correctly and make sure she understood the technique and what needed to be done.”

By the time VCU’s first tournament this season rolled around Aug. 28-29, Frey was comfortable in her new digs and ready to show it.

In four matches at the Rams’ own VCU/Third Degree Sportswear Invitational, Frey averaged a team-best 3.76 kills with 2.53 digs and hit .223. VCU finished 4-0 during the weekend, and Frey was named to the all-tournament team, as well as selected Colonial Athletic Association Offensive Player of the Week.

“I think I was just ready to play because we had such a long preseason,” Frey said. “So I just went out there and swung my heart out.”

FOLLOW THE LEADER
Frey’s work ethic and dedication also impressed her teammates, who voted her, along with senior Ivana Rich, a team captain in August. It’s a title she’s proud to wear, not just because of the responsibility it requires, but because it’s also a nod to her development as a player.

“I definitely wouldn’t have been able to be a captain the last two years, because I didn’t have that confidence,” Frey said. “Performance adds into it a lot. I feel like I’m not really able to help the rest of the team and tell them they should be doing this or that if I can’t do it.”

In addition to her growth as a player, Frey has also matured in the way that she leads.

“The way that you say something really determines if it’s going to be accepted or not. You can help somebody be successful if you can say it in a way that they’re going to receive the information and want to change or do something right,” Finley said. “I think she grew a lot in that area and it made her a lot better leader this year, because she can say things in the right fashion.”

Frey’s comfort level as a leader and as a player is one of the main reasons the Rams find themselves in the thick of the CAA race for the second straight season.

“I just feel like I’m in a really good spot right now,” Frey said.

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