A Volleyball Story
Category: Kitchen Sink...
Posted Thursday, April 03, 2008 at 06:42 AM [GMT-6]

Back in the day when I was a corporate drone and building websites was a hobby, I offered a free site in a silent auction during my employer's United Way campaign. I thought it might be of interest to someone with a home-based business, or perhaps even a family who wanted a personal site (this was in the late Nineties, well before such things became commonplace). I was a bit surprised to learn that the high bidder wanted me to create a site for her daughter's club volleyball team.

I thought that was pretty cool, and not only built them a website but continued to maintain it (at no charge) for the next couple of years, until most of the girls graduated from high school. When they decided there was no longer a need for the site, the team surprised me with a volleyball that bore the signatures of each of the players, along with their numbers and nicknames. I thought it was a sweet gesture and I kept the ball on display in my office until I no longer had an office, at which time it was packed in a box and carried home.

Fast forward to a few weeks ago, when the commemorative volleyball came forth from one of the multitude of boxes we unpacked during the move. The ball rested in the corner of my home office for a couple of weeks, until I finally came to the conclusion that I simply had no place for it.

However, I couldn't bring myself to throw it out, or even to donate it. Even though I never knew any of the girls whose names appeared on the ball, and though I was certain that none of them would today even remember signing it, I also believed that it was special to them at the time. But, what to do with it?

Then it struck me: why not try to find one of the players and see if she wanted the ball? I decided to start searching the internet until I found a likely candidate, make contact, and take it from there. I knew that the odds were slim that ten years after the fact, I could find one of the players who cared, but I felt it was worth the effort.

At random, I picked a name from the ball. OK, my selection wasn't entirely random; I've got enough sense to realize that my chances were better if I chose a less common name (vs., say, Mary Smith), so I chose at random one of the more unusual names (which I won't share, for reasons of privacy).

As luck would have it, Google gave me a promising link in its first search result. The name was associated with a PhD candidate (computer science) at a major Texas university, and the link was to her personal grad student website. I clicked over, still not sure this was the person I was seeking, and found a blurb in her online bio that referred to her volleyball career as an undergraduate at another smaller university in Texas. That gave me enough confidence to email her.

I sent the email, then wondered if (1) I had the right girl, and (2) if I was going to weird out some poor grad student. But I was delighted to receive a reply just a couple of hours later.

How great is that? Needless to say, I was more than eager to ship the ball to her, and I hope the names on it bring back lots of happy memories.

Funny how things work out sometimes, isn't it?