It was 6 a.m. on July 7, and Melanie Crow stepped into the Missouri volleyball locker room for her first workout of the preseason, knowing very little about her new teammates and hoping for the best.
The 6-foot-1 outside hitter had just transferred from Mississippi to Missouri as a redshirt junior.
“I just kind of walked into the locker room and was just like ‘Hi, I’m Mel, nice to meet all of you,’” Crow said. “I was thrown in and it worked out for the best. It was really easy to just start things off that way.”
Two months later and two weeks into the season, Crow calls her new team a family. She said she couldn’t be happier with her decision to transfer.
“For me personally, it takes me a while to warm up to people,” she said. “But it didn’t really take me long at all to start having conversations with people and getting to know them. That made me want to open up and bond with the team and just kind of helped me fit in more. It was extremely easy to click with all of them.”
The decision to transfer came when Mississippi said they would not clear Crow to play for the team after she suffered a concussion last year five matches into her junior season. She ended up redshirting for the remainder of the season, and the Wildwood, Missouri, native wanted to come back to her home state to finish out her collegiate volleyball career.
Since Mississippi and Missouri are both in the Southeastern Conference, there are specific rules as to where an athlete can transfer. Typically, an athlete who plays for an SEC school cannot transfer to another SEC school unless she obtains a waiver from the school she is transferring from and supplies documentation through the conference.
“(Mississippi) said, ‘from a health standpoint, we’re not going to clear you to play here,’” Missouri coach Wayne Kreklow said. “I have to give them a lot of credit. I mean, when they found out really the only place she was interested in was Mizzou, I don’t think they were real happy about it, but I think they did the right thing in being on board with her making that move.”
Crow obtained the waiver to contact Kreklow about an opportunity to play at Missouri, and her email came while he was with his team in China, waiting to load the bus for a practice they had in the morning.
The email came as a surprise to Kreklow — he had heard of Crow, since she was a top player at an SEC school — but he did not know that she was even interested in transferring, let alone in coming to Missouri.
“I kind of did a double-take,” Kreklow said. “I told the rest of the staff, and we called around and that kind of led to a month-long process of jumping through a lot of hoops to get her here. It was kind of weird, just out of the blue all of a sudden, but we were like, ‘Wow, this could be a big deal for us.’”
Crow said the two months between her contacting Kreklow and her starting summer workouts with the team were fast-paced and stressful as she figured out where she would live and what her academics would be like.
Since coming to Columbia, though, Crow said she has not been homesick, even though she is at a new school with a new team.
“It’s been weird for me to come here and be completely lost in all aspects, but the best thing about coming here is that I have all these people here to help me along the way,” Crow said. “I think that’s why I’ve been so grounded since the first second I came here.”
As far as the actual volleyball goes, Crow is already making an impact on the court in a Missouri jersey. At the Tiger Invitational on Sept. 2-3, Crow led the team in kills (56), kills per set (4), aces (6) and points (63.5). Despite her efforts, the team collected their first two losses of the season.
Crow said the immediate bond on the team helped her on the court, even though she wasn’t anticipating a leadership role in the first place.
“Coming off of Ole Miss, I was in a strong leadership position and people looked towards me,” she said. “When I came to Mizzou, I just wanted to follow suit, to see how things were run and how they ran things and just do my job. It’s exciting to know that they are excited about me and the possibilities that can happen this season.”
Crow has emerged as a leader, filling the spot of last season’s lone senior Regan Peltier as outside hitter.
She also has experience in Division I volleyball; Ole Miss finished seventh in the SEC last year, and Crow has started for the Rebels since her freshman year.
“I think bringing in an outside hitter with two years of high and successful experience, it’s a gift,” Kreklow said. “If she can stay healthy, I anticipate her maintaining that impact player status for us.”
Kreklow said Crow is healthy, but the possibility of injury is always there, just as it is for any athlete.
“You know, at the end of the day, with everybody, you’re crossing your fingers and hoping that nothing weird happens,” he said. “The only thing you can really do is hope that nothing happens and just realize that sometimes it does but that’s just the way it goes and get past it.”
Although Missouri had heavily recruited Crow out of high school, she didn’t want to attend school in her home state. However, her perspective changed after the concussion.
“When she got out of high school, she wanted to go out-of-state because, you know, that whole ‘spread her wings’ kind of thing, get out of Missouri, all that stuff,” Melanie’s father Terry Crow said. “When she got hurt and we talked about her playing again, she said, ‘The only school I would go to would be Mizzou.’”
Melanie’s thoughts about what school she wanted to attend wasn’t the only thing that changed. She said that her perspective on the court changed as well.
The questions around her concussion seem to be endless, she said, and she’s not to the point where she thinks she is invincible. There always is a chance she could get hurt again. She doesn’t dwell on it, though, because she doesn’t want the fear of an injury to come between her and playing volleyball.
“I know that things happen at any point in time, and I’m just excited to be doing what I love and to be healthy doing what I love at this point in time,” Crow said. “I have a different perspective and I know I can go out there and work hard and I’m mentally and physically capable of doing that.”
Part of that new perspective comes from the new team and coaching staff. The team has weekly meetings with Dr. Scotta Morton, who emphasizes positive psychology with the players.
Crow said that was the biggest difference she noticed from Ole Miss to Missouri — the players have a more positive attitude than what she has seen before.
“The biggest thing I’ve learned is people really take what we learn in the meetings to their heart,” she said. “They don’t take days off, they hold everyone accountable, and they just have this fight inside of them that is really infectious and makes you want to work hard for other people.”
_Edited by Peter Baugh | pbaugh@themaneater.com_
