Local pair setting standard for volleyball

RICHLAND -- Chelsey Bettinson has a unique perspective on the CBBN coaches' selections as the league's top two setters.

The past three autumns, the junior outside hitter has played alongside senior Krysta Olberding on the Richland volleyball team.

Then last club season, Bettinson played with Southridge junior Andrea Smith with the Columbia Juniors U-16 Black team that won three tournament titles.

"Oh, I love them both," Bettinson said, her voice bubbling through the telephone headset. "They're both so good.

"I mean, they both throw themselves out to get the ball. They go for everything. They're both real good at placing sets. They're both real consistent. It's real easy to adjust to them."

A long pause ensues as she tries to think of any differences between the two. Give me another minute, she asks.

Finally, she gives up. "It's just so hard to compare them," she said.

Area fans can judge for themselves this week at Toyota Center, as both Olberding and Smith have led their teams to their first-ever 4A state tournament appearances.

The Bombers open play at 9 a.m. today against Auburn Riverside, while the Suns follow them on the same court at 10:30 a.m. against Skyview.

The duo finished 1-3 in the league in assists per set -- Smith had a league-leading 10.1, Olberding at 8.3 -- but numbers hardly begin to tell the story of their importance to their teams.

"You look at all the teams at state, they all have great setters," Southridge coach John Lengphounpraseut said. "You don't have a setter, you're pretty much toast."

And to think, the two almost were teammates in green and gold.

Olberding moved to Richland at age 8 from Hermiston after her parents divorced. She took up volleyball in seventh grade and quickly took to the role of setter, the same position her mother, Dee Holmes, played at Ricks College.

"I like being a leader," Olberding said. "In group projects at school, I'm naturally drawn to taking the lead role. So once I learned the responsibilities of a setter, how much impact you have on a team, being a leader, running the court, I liked that."

Smith, meanwhile, attended Liberty Christian and played club ball for her father, Rocky, until it was time for high school.

LC doesn't offer track, her other favorite sport -- she has qualified twice for state in the hurdles and run on a state champion relay team -- so it came down to Richland and Southridge as her choices.

"Southridge was closer," she said. "I'm glad I picked it."

Like Olberding, Smith gravitated toward being a setter, following in her sister Ashlynn's footsteps.

"It's being able to bring the team together," Andrea said of what drew her to the position. "You're the cream filling of the Oreo."

She loves when people tell her how being a setter is so easy. "I wish it were," she said, laughing. "You have to know everything that's going on on the court, or else you're lost. There's a lot of mental game to setting."

Smith started for the Suns from her first match as a freshman, and her athleticism impressed Lengphounpraseut. But it's the improvements she's made in the mental part of the game that he credits with getting Southridge over the hump this season.

"She has matured a lot this season," he said. "Not many balls drop on Andrea because of her ability to chase. You're not always going to get the perfect pass all the time in high school, so the benefit of quickness and speed is huge."

Olberding doesn't dart around the court that way. She doesn't have the quirky trigger to her sets that Smith does without ever thinking about it.

She just goes about her business of putting up perfect set after perfect set.

"She's just real smooth," Smith said admiringly. "Graceful, like a dance. That's a great way to put it. She's got great hands, and she can take a bad pass and turn it into something simple, easy, clean."

Her other attribute, Bombers coach Bob Raidl said, is her ability to keep her team cool under fire.

"You don't want someone to raise the tension level, and that's one of her strengths," the Army reservist said. "She says the right things that people need to hear when they're struggling."

What Olberding struggles with now is deciding what to do for college. A Running Start student, she'll have her associate's degree completed, and until recently figured her playing days were over once high school was done.

But now, she's thinking about walking on at Utah State, where she wants to pursue a degree in elementary education. She got a phone call from Concordia College in Bronxville, N.Y., "but that's so far away.

"I just haven't put the tapes together and sent them off to recruit myself," she said. "It'd be fun to have that college volleyball experience, though."

Smith can't decide between volleyball and track as her future. "My heart's broken in two on that," she said.

The self-professed "big nerd" has enough trouble finding enough hours in the day, what with AP Calculus, National Honor Society, Mock Trial, the school choir (she sings soprano) and the anatomy class she's taking for her future vocation as a veteranarian.

"We get to take a trip down to Pullman to the cadaver lab," she said. "I can't wait."

Olberding's take? "All I remember is dissecting pigs in AP biology, and all the formaldahyde," she said.

OK, we found a difference after all.