It wasn’t just that Pullman High volleyball player Maddy Oelke had 15 kills in a sweep of Clarkston. It was the efficiency with which she did so.
“She kept pounding the ball,” Greyhounds coach Megan McNannay said. “And I told her afterward, that’s averaging five kills per set, which is pretty phenomenal. I think she also only had two errors on 20 attempts, so her hitting percentage was pretty ridiculous.”
For that, online Tribune readers voted her Prep Athlete of the Week.
McNannay said Oelke possesses a quiet confidence.
“She leads more by example,” McNannay said. “And off the court, she’s just a really sweet person and a good person.”
To illustrate that, McNannay told a story from over the summer, when she’d just been hired to coach the Greyhounds.
“I started with them over the summer, and the previous coach and I were friends, so I knew a lot of the offense they ran.”
But there was one problem. The Greyhounds speak their plays in Farsi.
“So I kept getting everything confused,” McNannay said.
To help McNannay learn the offense in the team’s preferred language, Oelke handwrote all the plays, along with a phonetic guide to pronouncing them in Farsi.
“That was really thoughtful of her,” the coach said. “And she was such a good help.”
Nominees for the latest Prep Athlete of the Week award can be found on Page 2B.
