“The feeling when I get a kill against a really good defense. It’s a thrill. It’s knowing that you’re pushing your team closer to winning. And the feeling of getting up in the air and putting the ball down, it’s… it’s a rush,” said Hannah Bowers describing her favorite parts of volleyball with a huge smile on her face. Bowers is a senior at Urbana who has played two years on JV and two years on Varsity since freshman year. She started playing volleyball in eighth grade for the Metro North Club team. Today, Bowers is getting recruitment offers from many colleges and playing as a middle hitter for Urbana High School’s Varsity team.

Bowers discovered her lifelong love for the sport out of pure curiosity. She stumbled upon the court because she was looking for a new sport to play and had a friend on the team. She describes falling in love with volleyball as “something that I wasn’t naturally great at, and it pushed me to work and I kept wanting to get better.” Although Bowers now has complete, utter dedication for this sport, in the beginning this dedication was tested. She played tennis before volleyball and sometimes wishes she could have stuck to it, but in her words, “Volleyball became my priority pretty much right after I started.” After this first test her path in volleyball started paving itself in full throttle.
To read the rest of Bowers’s story, pick up a copy of The Hawkeye from the newsstand near the front office or the media center.