Expectations don’t mean anything

July 15, 2024, Grace Solberg entered the Training HAUS – Flagship facility in Eagan, Minnesota, expecting to get cleared for a return to volleyball. She was excited to get back to the sport she’s played for 13 years – from fourth grade to now. 

10 months prior – September 1, 2023 – Solberg, a senior outside hitter for the Bethel University Royals volleyball team, tore the anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) in her right knee. 

The injury came just minutes into the team’s first game of the 2023 season at the University of Northwestern. Solberg recorded one kill before going down. In the moment, she didn’t think it was serious, much less season-ending. Early analysis showed merely a minor patella tendon injury.

But when the scans came back, she was devastated to learn that her junior season had begun and ended with an ACL tear.

Despite the discouragement, Solberg made a commitment to her coaches.

“The first thing that I said when I let them know that I was injured and done for the season… was that I was going to be ready for the 2024 season,” Solberg said. “Knowing that was a commitment that I had made, not only to them, but to myself, it was easier to push through.” 

She underwent ligament repair surgery September 13, 2023, and thus began her more than year-long road of rehab and recovery. 

Months of helplessness on crutches, excruciatingly simple yet difficult knee exercises and even a second surgery in January to clean out the cartilages inhibiting the ligament’s full healing all led to the July test at Training Haus. 

Training HAUS’s “Testing for Return to Athletic Competition”, or TRAC, which measures knee strength through a series of kicks – both unweighted and under tension – was supposed to be the payoff of all the struggle of the past ten months.

After the 45-minute TRAC, Braidy Solie, Solberg’s Training HAUS trainer, showed her the metrics. Her knee was still not ready. An unmet expectation. 

“It was really frustrating to feel that I’ve been doing [physical therapy] day in, day out for five months and not seeing the results I wanted,” Solberg said. 

Instead she had to rehab for ten more weeks. 

So she kept working, determined that an injury would not define her time left on the court. 

In September of this year, Solberg made good on her promise and was fully cleared to return to, but not without some initial speed bumps. 

“Leading up to getting on the court, I couldn’t really picture myself there again,” Solberg said. “It was a huge mental barrier to have to get over.” 

She overcame that obstacle with the belief that extended rehab boosted her knee to even stronger than before the injury. 

Solberg’s absence created a gaping hole at the hitting position that Bethel struggled to fill as head coach Gretchen Hunt rotated players in and out. Solberg said the players struggled to settle into each position. 

“You’d spent all of preseason building and developing this offense and the lineup,” Hunt said. “When that happens in literally the middle of the match, you’re recalibrating all your expectations.” 

Expectations are a dangerous thing in sports. One season a coach might expect a big year from her junior outside hitter. Suddenly, that outside hitter is on the ground, writhing in pain. 

Another year, that coach might expect a development year with lots of contributing youth. But that too can change. 

“I feel like the longer I [coach], the more I almost start with zero expectations,” Hunt, who is in her 24th year leading the Royals, said. “Every season is an adventure, and it never, ever plays out how you think it might.” 

Case in point: with Solberg back, the Royals have a new consistency despite graduating five seniors, all of whom played 50 or more sets in 2023. 

Just two years removed from a 10-1 conference record in the Minnesota Intercollegiate Athletic Conference (MIAC), Hunt’s 2023 squad won 11 games overall with a 6-5 conference record. This year, the team also won six conference games and have yet to lose one as of October 22. 

Solberg has dominated her return season. Her 3.31 kills/set is second on the team, just behind the overpowering sophomore middle blocker Peyton Howie. This once again shattered Hunt’s expectations. 

“I quickly moved from like, ‘whatever we can get from Grace is icing on the cake’ to ‘wow, we really need you,’” Hunt said. 

Bethel’s revamped 2024 roster features major contributions from freshmen Hannah Penke, who’s third on the team in kills and second in total digs, Grace Therrien, who leads the team in digs, and Lauren Hetfield, whose average of 2.66 digs per set is second on the team, behind only Therrien. Camille Renken, another freshman, has added her own 97 kills in 64 sets as well. 

“They don’t look like freshmen when they’re out there on the court,” Solberg said. “They’ve really risen to the challenge.” 

More expectations broken. 

“With young players, you often have uneven play,” Hunt said. “So I am happily surprised, and it’s another reminder to me that I should just not have any expectations.” 

Both Hunt and Solberg said, almost word-for-word, at the beginning of the season they didn’t expect to start out their conference schedule 6-0. 

Even Penke, who only committed to play college volleyball late in her senior year of high school, has been surprised by her role this year. 

“Coming in, I kind of expected not to play a lot,” Penke said. “Especially with Grace Solberg in front of me and another senior…I didn’t expect [to play].” 

Yet, in spite of every expectation set by coaches, teammates and spectators, the Royals’ freshman class has contributed 30% of the 1,209 points scored as of October 22. 

Hunt used the first couple games of the season to evaluate her freshmen. In an August tournament in Pella, Iowa, the starting lineup came together. Solberg was participating in limited sets – she wasn’t fully cleared yet. Penke subbed in during a three-set blowout loss versus the University of Wisconsin-Platteville and played well. 

Hunt kept her in the rest of the season. 

“After that tournament, that’s when we started thriving,” Penke said. “We started thriving as a team because we finally got our six.” 

The team continued to gel during its late-September trip to Gallaudet University in Washington, D.C. Gallaudet is a school for the deaf and hard of hearing, where American Sign Language (ASL) is used exclusively to communicate. 

Bethel lost its first game of the weekend to the Gallaudet Bison in three sets. It was an adjustment to play in a quieter gym. The Bison pointed and used hand signals rather than audibly calling out signals on the court, and Solberg said it distracted players at times. 

“It was so fun to see them play because volleyball is such a verbal sport,” Hunt said. “To see how they communicate is so fascinating and fun.” 

In the team’s first game back in Arden Hills against Macalester College, Solberg’s return reached its peak. Solberg swung 41 times for 21 kills, a career-high, leading to another three-set win. 

Despite her high kill numbers this season, Solberg knows she can’t do it all herself. 

“A huge strength of our team this year is our defense,” Solberg said. “And the amount that they’re able to keep us in the point.” 

Bethel leads the MIAC in digs this season, and Therrien – the freshman – leads the way for them. 

Five conference games remain for the Royals, but none as crucial to their first-place goals as the November 2 matchup against Gustavus Adolphus College — the three-time-defending MIAC champions three years running. 

“Until somebody dethrones Gustavus, you have to say that they are the favorites in every match they go into,” Hunt said. 

Very little has gone how anyone expected this volleyball season to go for the Royals. So maybe it’s best if everyone expects Gustavus to beat Bethel. Maybe it’s best if no one expects them to win the MIAC. 

After all, sports shatter expectations all the time. 

Additional reporting by CJ Wrzesien