Watching Creighton volleyball middle blocker Lauren Smith swing for kills or set up blocks alongside 2012 MVC Defensive Player of the Year Kelli Browning, you would have to double and perhaps triple check the volleyball media guide to make sure that she is in fact just a freshman for the nationally-ranked Bluejays.
Freshman Lauren Smith (16) has turned heads early in the 2013 Creighton volleyball season (WBR/Spomer) CLICK TO BUY PHOTO
Last Tuesday, Smith tied a Creighton freshman record for blocks in a single match with nine as she helped the Bluejays defeat the Kansas Jayhawks (25-21, 15-25, 25-17, 29-27) for the first time in school history. Not to be limited to just tying freshman records, the 6-foot-4 freshman out of Lincoln, Neb., registered 10 kills and a school-record .909 attack percentage, the highest of any Creighton player, past or present, with at least 10 swings. Her record-setting performances for the 7-2 Bluejays didn’t go unnoticed as yesterday she was named Freshman of the Week by the Big East Conference.
“Lauren’s been connecting pretty well,” Creighton head coach Kirsten Bernthal Booth said, “but from our standpoint we’re not totally surprised. We felt last season she was such a key cog on the scout side. She was tearing us up and I think made us a lot better. She had a concussion last spring, and I think that slowed her through the spring some. I don’t think in the spring people got to see how good she is. I think she’s finally getting her rhythm.”
After seeing some of Smith’s performances some might wonder about why she spent last season as the team’s lone redshirt, and what her impact could have been for a 29-4 team that made it to the second round of the NCAA Tournament. However, don’t expect Smith herself to be one of those people wondering ‘what if?’
“I agreed with it,” Smith said in regards to the redshirt season. “I had a dislocated elbow coming in, and I needed a lot of work just getting better before my first year. I was lucky to have that opportunity to redshirt.”
Because of the team’s depth and experience in the middle, Booth saw a lot of value in redshirting her talented newcomer.
“We felt like Kelli Browning was emerging and we had a senior middle,” Booth said. “We look back sometimes and say it was a mistake that we didn’t redshirt this kid because she didn’t get a lot of playing time. At the beginning of the season [Lauren] was coming off an injury, and we felt like we had two very strong middles. We were concerned she was going to land on the bench. I don’t know whether she would’ve earned a starting spot by midseason, but at that point we were committed to the redshirt and we were playing well. Our philosophy was we sure don’t want to waste a kid that has this kind of talent and just have her on the bench.”
That talent and the consistent compliments from her former coaches made Smith an easy target for the Creighton coaching staff.
“I think the first thing that we were attracted to before we even met her as a person was that she has a great, physical body,” said Booth. “She’s very tall which is obviously big in volleyball. She’s strong, muscular. As we did more research we were told by her coaches what a great, young woman she was, and I got told several times that she was their favorite kid to coach. Those are all things that you like to hear.”
Despite being heavily recruited, and hailing from a city that features the three-time national champion Nebraska Cornhuskers, it didn’t take long for Smith to take a look at Creighton and decide that it was where she wanted to go.
“Lauren was getting recruited by several good schools, the Big 12 in particular, and we thought it would be a long process,” Booth said. “She knew we were looking at another middle at the time, and that kid was set to visit the next week. So [Lauren] came for a visit and then committed the next day. It was a very fast recruiting process after the visit. We really connected with Lauren, and she really connected with our program. It’s been great ever since.”
Smith didn’t make it seem like attending Creighton was a difficult decision, which probably explains the quick commitment she gave after visiting the campus.
“Creighton was really special to me,” she said. “I loved the coaching staff. They were different from any of the other schools I visited, and the girls [on the team] really made a difference. They were so nice, and I just remember thinking ‘oh, they’re exactly like me. I want to come here. These could be my best friends for a lifetime.'”
Also, for Smith, Creighton had more to offer outside of the potential relationships she could build with her coaches and teammates.
“The academics are wonderful, and that’s what being a student-athlete is all about… student first, then athlete. We’re doing really well this season, so I think I made the right decision… I love it here,” she said.
As Creighton continues their run through this rigorous non-conference schedule Smith’s performance may be the key to success going forward. The two losses to No. 11 UCLA (1-3) and Cal (0-3) are the only matches this season where the reigning Big East Freshman of the Week has failed to hit better than .300. She leads the team in hitting at .399, which is 29 percentage points higher than the current Creighton single-season record held by Browning. She is also second on the team in blocks with 34, and third in kills with 74.
The early performances have impressed Booth.
“We felt Lauren could be a key cog offensively for us. I mean her hitting nine-hundred in that match, that’s ridiculous, we sure didn’t expect that, but did expect her to give us another offensive weapon this year.”
Booth went on to talk about some of the technical improvements that she sees Smith has made in her short time at Creighton.
“She’s up really quick, so she and Michelle [Sicner] connect really well,” Booth said. “I think she’s hard [to defend] because she’s up really fast offensively. She’s really developed her vision, and I think that’s where she can continue to get better. She’s running a couple sets really, really well. We have to expand what she can do, set-wise, then I think she’s really going to be lethal.”