Wahine coaches put faith in freshman
By Ferd Lewis
Advertiser Columnist
With each visit by the mail carrier, Melody Eckmier's hopes sagged a little more.
Kyle Sackowski • The Honolulu Advertiser
It had been bad enough that she blew out the anterior cruciate ligament in her left knee during her junior year of high school and was awaiting the surgery that would cost her a senior season of volleyball as well. But adding insult to the injury were the rejection letters that started to mount.
UH volleyball coach Dave Shoji recruited 6-foot-4 Melody Eckmier despite a serious knee injury she suffered in high school. Now the redshirt freshman from Simi Valley, Calif., is being counted on to be a strong presence in the middle for the Wahine.
Colleges that had once inundated her by the dozens with recruiting letters quickly wrote Eckmier off, several letters at a time. "Basically, I got a lot of letters saying ... 'bye,' " Eckmier said.
So when the envelope with the University of Hawai'i logo arrived at her Simi Valley, Calif., home, Eckmier prepared to add another to the growing pile of rejections. Wahine coach Dave Shoji and assistant Charlie Wade had been in the El Camino College gym when she heard the frightening "pop" — not the kind of impression likely to impress a coach or earn a scholarship.
But as she opened the envelope and began to read, it wasn't the "Dear Melody" letter she had feared. It was a hand-written note from Shoji, one in which aloha didn't mean "goodbye."
"It was a very nice letter that basically told me to hang in there," Eckmier said. "I pretty much thought my career was over; that I would just watch volleyball and not play it. But, after I finished reading it, it was like, 'Wow! Maybe I can play again. Maybe somebody still wants me.' That really motivated me."
Two years after just about everybody else had crossed her off their lists, the Wahine hope to pencil Eckmier into the middle blocker position in their starting lineup.
Now, she hopes to stand tall in the middle for the school that stood by her when few others dared. "I want to be a good, solid middle blocker for this team," Eckmier said. "I want to find a way to contribute, to make other teams say, 'watch out for their middle.' "
At nearly 6 feet, 4 inches, there will be no overlooking her presence on the floor even as a raw redshirt freshman, which is a large part of why the Wahine were reluctant to give up on Eckmier when she was headed for surgery.
It was the recollections of her standing, as Wade recalls it, "head and shoulders above the net," that stayed with the UH coaches. It was the glimpses of her potential and what it might amount to two, three, four years down the road that continued to intrigue the Wahine as they hesitated to delete her name from their recruit file.
"In this sport your responsibilities are defined by your position," Wade said. "Setters set, outside hitters hit and middle blockers block and that kid could move along the net and block."
Said Shoji: "I don't think she'd mind me saying she takes up a lot of space in there. She looks a lot like what you want in the middle, big and strong. There aren't many players like that available each year and sometimes you have to take a chance. We had Heather Bown at the time and knew what a player like her could mean to us. In Melody's case, it crossed our mind that she might never play for us. But with the way medical technology is these days and knowing what kind of a hard worker she was, we decided to take a chance.
"Just looking at her now, I think we're going to be really glad we did."
