Vista Online

Fall/Winter 2001

Taking The Path Of The Most Resistance

Volleyball

Community. From the moment a Greenville College student steps on campus, the word reverberates through her mind. She can’t escape it. There’s talk of community in chapel, community in the classroom, community in the dorms, and community...on the volleyball court? As a senior on the women’s volleyball team, I anticipated a great season of playing a sport that I loved.

Where else but on the hardwood can you hit an object as hard as you possibly can, while still having fun with a great group of women? My expectations veered sharply, however, and took an unanticipated path, the path of most resistance, the path of community led by Coach Rick McPeak.

In the book The Different Drum M. Scott Peck states, “groups assembled deliberately to form themselves into community routinely go through certain stages...” These four stages of community include pseudo community, chaos, emptiness, and finally community. On the first day of practice our team packed into a fifteen-passenger van, and was forced to spend the next 72 hours getting to know one another.

Freshman Heather Caddell says, “We started out by getting thrown into it.” According to Peck, pseudo community creates an atmosphere in which members are extremely pleasant with one another and avoid all disagreement.” It was in this stage that our team stagnated for the first half of the season: playing well in some games and not so well in others, but always being pleasant to one another.

Chaos was the catalyst to move our team from the superficiality of daily interaction to a more genuine understanding of each other. Members of the team made a well-intentioned, but misguided attempt to create unity. Instead of fostering community, these members received disciplinary probation for their actions, a three game suspension, and a total breakdown of the team structure—a structure with which we had all become complacent.
Caddell and Sarah Swanson both stated that this part of the season was both “difficult and confusing because we were not directly involved in the situation, so we had to sit back and observe much of the time.”

Emptiness followed the chaos, in which all members obliterated every barrier to communication so that we could be fully authentic with one another. Rain fell as our team piled into a room, and we emptied ourselves. Not one eye was dry as we shared the things that bothered us about one another. With tears streaming down our faces and sobs intermittently interrupting speech, we spoke to each other of hurt, frustration, and disappointment that affected every member on the team.

After emptying ourselves on that gray day in October, we began to experience group death. Each member of the team was communicating frustrations, and genuinely listening to one another; in doing so, the individuals in the group slowly died. We were formed into a new creation—a team. The death process was a necessary evil that formed us into a true community.

With the emptying process came the idea that there is a greater good outside one’s self, if one will just succumb to the pain of outpouring. “Community” by Peck’s standards had not been met by the end of our season. I believe that we had come closer to this ideal, but there was still more dying that needed to take place in me and in everyone else. However, this process helped to solve the problems that are found in pseudo community.

Volleyball is difficult. Trying to live in true community is even more difficult. The path our team embarked on in the two-month season was “a growing experience,” according to freshman Meredith McDaniels. Did we succeed at the end of this journey? Sarah Swanson said, “We didn’t achieve it (community), but we were getting close, and if this season would have gone on longer, we might have reached true community.”

Community has not proved to be an achievable goal, but rather a process that has no end. McPeak stated, “The task of playing volleyball sabotaged our ability to become a true community. The fact that we had a losing season was, I think, a real loss for me because I felt as though it could have been a winning one. But at the same time, I embrace it because of the comfort of relationships that came as a result of the chaos.”

Julia Wheeler

Last updated: July 9, 2001