When her team played more than twice in a week during the regular season, St. Paul sophomore libero Corynne Smith woke up on Sundays with all kinds of aches and pains over her body.

“Battle scars,” Smith said proudly.

Such is the life for Smith and Huron libero Taryn Graham. The two are assigned to do their best to dig up kill attempts from opponents’ hitters to set up their respective team’s offense.

Along the way, many scrapes and bruises have accumulated in sacrificing the body to keep a ball alive.
“You get a little sore, but after a while you get used to it,” Graham said.

As both teams prepare for their respective state semifinal matches at the Wright State University Nutter Center in Dayton on Thursday and Friday, one of the biggest reasons both teams are there is the play of Smith and Graham.

“Her performance Saturday (against Archbold) was out of this world,” Huron coach Don Wood said of Graham, who set a new record for digs in a match with 45. “Some of the balls she dug, she saved us so many points … it’s hard to keep track of.”

A year ago, Graham was the second-leading hitter behind first team All-Ohioan Jesse Miedema on a team that lost in a Division III regional semifinal to St. Henry. However, Wood decided to take a chance and make Graham a full-time libero in the back row this season, and it has paid big dividends.

Graham has 539 digs on the season, and she will surpass the 1,000 career dig mark with just six digs Friday in Huron’s match against Middletown Bishop Fenwick.

“A lot of people thought I was a little crazy when I changed her to libero,” Wood said. “But I saw what she was doing for her club team as a defensive specialist, and I actually thought I would be the crazy one not to use her there.”

Graham took the move in stride.

“I want to be a libero in college,” she said. “And we had some good hitters come in from this year’s sophomore class and then Taylor moved in, so we thought it would be a good idea to try libero.”

Meanwhile, Smith has accumulated 471 digs this season and already has 881 career digs with at least one match left in her sophomore season.

“It’s hard to put what she’s capable of into words,” St. Paul coach Nancy Miller said. “And she’s gotten really better throughout the year. She was awesome at the beginning of the year, and she is remarkable now.

“She’s a libero in all sense of what it takes to play the position. She has developed a voice, and that’s made a real difference. She is the general of the back row and when things aren’t going right and something needs to be said, she isn’t afraid to do it.”

Smith talked about how she goes about reading a hitter.

“I watch where the pass is going and follow the setter,” Smith said. “If it’s a crazy pass and they set up off the net, it means your hit won’t be coming straight down on you and you have to flatten out.

“You have to read whichever way their body is facing because they can snap their hands each way.”
Wood said Graham is one of the best he’s seen at picking the right direction of a hitter.

“It takes a visual sense of where ball will go,” he said. “There are three ways a hitter can go, and Taryn generally picks the right direction.

“That ability to read what’s in front of you to where you have to be, it’s such a natural thing. You can’t coach a kid do it as well as she does. As much as a coach would like to take credit, with something like that you really can’t.”

Miller likens Smith’s abilities to a natural gift.

“I consider it a gift because I’ve only had a handful of players in my tenure who could read the hitter like she does,” she said. “That is a gift because they have the ability to watch that hitter coming in on her approach and if you watch Corynne, she makes the littlest adjustments out of our base defense into where that hitter is looking to go. It’s amazing to watch.”

Much like an offensive lineman doesn’t get the limelight in football as compared to a quarterback, racking up a lot of digs in volleyball isn’t considered as glamorous as having a dozen kills hitting.

“That’s true, but when you get a great dig up it is a good feeling,” Graham said.

Smith said it’s just a small part of the big picture.

“Everyone plays their part on the team in us getting the dig,” she said. “The block sets it up, and everyone around you talks to you, so it’s not just any one person.”

What does it take to be willing to take all kinds of shots from powerful hitters in a simple attempt to keep a ball alive?

“It takes determination and heart that you know you are going to get to it,” Smith said. “Nothing hits the floor. You just have to have that mentality.”