Article from The Stanford Daily

Having had an emergency appendectomy just a few days earlier, the senior guard was stuck on the sidelines, leaving the Cardinal without its top scorer from the regular season. Yamasaki could only watch as her Stanford team fell in the finals to Arizona State for its only Pac-10 loss of the year, coming in its last game before the NCAA tournament, no less.

Yamasaki did return for the Cardinal’s run in the NCAA tournament, but it seemed that the last college sports memory for the Oregon City native in her home state would be a bitter one.

But seven months later, Yamasaki finds herself with a most unexpected chance to rewrite that final Oregon memory, and in a way that few would have predicted: wearing a Stanford volleyball jersey.

After facing Oregon State (5-5, 0-2 Pac-10) tomorrow, the No. 4 Cardinal volleyball team (10-1, 1-0 Pac-10) will head to McArthur Court to face the Ducks (9-5, 0-2) on Saturday, as Yamasaki makes her first visit to Eugene as a volleyball player in nearly three years.

“It’s nice to get a chance to get one last victory on that floor,” Yamasaki said. “Oregon has been pretty harsh to play at. They’re very loyal Ducks fans, and since my freshman year, they’ve heckled me and hated me since I’m from Oregon, and I didn’t go there.”

The people in Oregon will sure be surprised to see her. Even at Stanford, people were caught off guard by Yamasaki’s return to the Cardinal volleyball squad.

Coming to Stanford as a two-sport athlete in 1998, Yamasaki hung up the spandex and the knee pads after her second year with the volleyball team in 1999 (she redshirted in 1998) to focus on basketball. It seemed like a bold move since she had started at outside hitter on the 1999 squad that had advanced to the NCAA championship game.

But the decision paid off, as Yamasaki became one of the most dominant players in Pac-10 basketball, earning first-team All-Conference and honorable mention All-America honors in her final year of basketball eligibility.

At the end of the year, she was selected in the second round of the WNBA Draft by the Miami Sol. Yamasaki went on to average 3.5 points per game in 15 games with the Sol in her rookie season this past summer.

As the WNBA season winded down, Yamasaki made plans to return to Stanford, primarily to finish up her undergraduate degree. But she had an odd desire as well, one that she had expressed to Stanford coach John Dunning last spring.

She had a year of volleyball eligibility left (though she wasn’t eligible to receive a scholarship); why not use it?

“I wanted to play both sports for four years, so I had the desire and I had the chance to do it,” Yamasaki said. “This seemed like the perfect thing.”

The calls were made, the clearances were arranged, and Yamasaki was back on the volleyball court for the first time in nearly three years just days before Stanford’s season began.

And it’s been a welcome transition back to the world of college sports, to say the least.

“It’s less intimate [in the pros]. It’s definitely a job,” she said. “It’s not fun meal times and ‘Let’s get together on Friday night.’ People are married; they have their lives. It’s still the real world even though it’s professional sports. College is so fun. Everything is right there for you.”

Yamasaki is mostly playing in a reserve role this year behind All-American outside hitters Logan Tom and Ogonna Nnamani. Yamasaki did start several matches earlier this month while Tom was playing with the U.S. national team at the World Championships, picking up a career-high 16 kills against San Jose State on Sept. 6.

Despite her limited playing time, Yamasaki has relished the chance to be back among college athletes, and her teammates have been more than glad to have her along for the ride as Stanford defends its national championship from last year.

“I’ve really respected [Yamasaki] as an athlete here. To get the chance to be her teammate is really neat,” Nnamani said. “She’s so much fun off the court , and she’s so much about business on the court. It’s great to have her here.”

The Cardinal shouldn’t have too much trouble getting redemption for Yamasaki in Oregon on Saturday.

The Ducks are last in the Pac-10 in kills and are almost entirely reliant on middle blocker Lindsay Closs, who leads the team with 4.23 kills per game, to carry the offense. That could spell trouble for Oregon when Closs is facing a double block from Stanford, the Pac-10 blocking leader, on every set she gets.

Stanford’s opponent Friday night, Oregon State, doesn’t have a whole lot of offense to brag about either. The Beavers are only hitting .230 on the season.

Oregon State is also last in the Pac-10 in blocking, which along with the Beavers’ offensive troubles points to one thing: a complete lack of size in the Corvallis squad. Only three players on its roster top out at over six feet tall (compared to nine on the Cardinal’s), meaning that the Stanford attackers are going to be hard to slow at the net.

The Beavers make up for their like of size with their incredible defense, averaging a whopping 18 digs per game.

“The Oregon schools are definitely great defensive schools,” said Stanford senior outside hitter Ashley Ivy. “Most schools we’ve played against are great defensive programs. We’ll have to find the holes in the court and that could be tougher, but it’s certainly do-able.”