On Friday, October 30, senior Kenna Hanses was voted 1st team all-KingCo for volleyball.
Every year, the Kingco Conference puts together a first team, which is a team made up of the best ten girls nominated from all over the league, and this team gets to play in a tournament at the end of the year together.
“Freshman and sophomore year, I had honorable mentions, and then last year, I got second team, so this year, I was really hoping for first team. I’m really excited to play,” Hanses said.
Hanses, who has been playing volleyball since seventh grade, plays both at Liberty and on her club team, Sudden Impact, a team from Bellevue that placed in the top 1% of all clubs in the U.S.
She puts an abundance of time into her passion—for her school team, Hanses puts in twelve hours a week for practice and games, and for her club team, she has three four hour practices a week and then tournaments on the weekends, from 6am-9pm. If you do the math, that’s roughly 39 hours a week.
Though all of Hanses’s hard practice and dedication to volleyball has undoubtedly made her a better player over the years, many people have supported her through her volleyball career.
“My teammates on my club team are very supportive. They’re strict on what I should do on weekends, and during practice—I’m very bubbly at practice—they tell me: ‘Kenna, you need to focus!’ They’re strict on that, and it keeps me in line, I guess,” Hanses said.
Hanses has also been inspired and supported by other athletes—she looked up to Kaleigh Nelson, a player on the UW volleyball team, who ended up playing in Europe.
“I looked up to her the past couple of year. She came to our practices a lot, and I really liked her. She’s very inspirational,” Hanses said.
Since Hanses is a senior, she’s starting to plan for the future, and she’s talking to a few coaches about college.
“I don’t know if I’d like to play in college, because it’s such a time-consuming commitment, so I’m still going to try to figure that out during club,” Hanses said.
Nevertheless, Hanses passionately leaves her last year of volleyball at Liberty with a bang, and is rewarded with an achievement that any volleyball player would aspire to get.