PHOTO BY RICK WALTER

Ryann will be trying to take her game to the next level with the Huskies.

New Digs:Ryann Carter taking the next step toward the big time

By Rick Walter

It’s a bright summer morning and Ryann Carter is standing on the brick walkway just outside her dream house near the shores of Lake Washington in the Montlake area of Seattle. It’s a big old brick thing that was recently restored. It has a huge amount of square footage and a gorgeous hardwood floor that has a big purple W in the middle of it. It has history. It even has a name: Hec Edmundson Pavilion.

Carter, an all-state volleyball player from Fife High School, is attending a summer volleyball camp with her new college coach Jim McLaughlin at the University of Washington campus and will be returning in the fall as a member of the Huskies team.

“Since I was a little girl, this has been my dream: to be standing in there, on that floor, under the lights, with my feet on that big purple W.”

As a drama major, there will be other lights on her, too. But this is the stage on which she really wants to perform. Having acted in plays at Fife, including “Alice in Wonderland,” “Guys and Dolls,” “Grease” and “Once Upon a Mattress,” she gave up her part in a Shakespeare play in her senior year because it conflicted with volleyball.

When she began winning tournament trophies and notice for her play, sometime during her junior year in high school she became committed to working as hard as she could at it.

“I started with basketball in kindergarten,” she says during a break at the camp. “When I was about nine, I went to a volleyball camp and I kind of liked that better, so I stayed with that.”

Carter joined a club team when she was 11, but was getting applause on the stage in school plays beginning in the eighth-grade.

“I’ve always loved performing and I love music, but once I started to get serious about volleyball, I guess it had to take a back seat.”

Carter is beginning to see the differences in high school volleyball, and what she will see in one of the top Division-I programs in the country.

“Everything, I mean everything, is up another step, another level. It’s a step higher, faster, quicker. At lunch, the varsity girls come out on the court and we can jump in with them if we want to. It’s amazing.”

Carter says the biggest difference between her high school experience, which concluded with a state all-star game at Fife earlier this month, and the one at this camp, can be summed up in one word:

“It is very, very, very intense.”

The competition for playing time at one of the top volleyball schools in the country is going to be very serious. But Carter’s work ethic, a function of her desire to keep playing this game at the highest level she can, is always answering to that dream she’s had since she was small.  

“This is the court I want to play on. I know I just have to work my butt off, figure it out. You know everybody here is going to play at a really high level. You just keep your head up, pay attention, and do whatever you have to do.”

Coach McLaughlin has worked first-hand with the Fife athlete.

“Doing good,” McLaughlin said, when asked about Carter.

Carter says she is thrilled to have been invited to be on this team for the 2008 season, but her goal now is to compete for a scholarship and to get playing time. And to take that next step with as little drama as possible.

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