VOLLEYBALL

Anderson has no regrets of leaving PSU program early

By Gordon Brunskill

Matt Anderson had a chance to pick up more personal awards, and possibly help Penn State win another national championship.

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Given a year of reflection, however, the former Nittany Lion men’s volleyball standout says he has no misgivings about leaving school early to play professionally overseas.

“I still think it was the best decision for me,” Anderson said last week. “The chances of me staying in school and the possibility of winning another national championship with that, and also getting my degree, yeah, I’ve had regrets a little bit. But I still think I made the right decision to go out and kind of put my name and my reputation on the line out there and prove myself a little bit to teams and also to myself that I could do it.”

If he had the chance to do it over again, would he do the same thing? “For sure,” he said.

The 6-foot-10 Anderson made these statements when he was reached in Anaheim, Calif., where he is training with the U.S. national team. The squad is preparing for the summer schedule for the World League, when the national teams of countries around the globe battle. The Americans won it last year en route to taking the gold medal at the Beijing Olympics.

Anderson has been training with the U.S. team since mid-May, when he arrived right after watching Penn State lose to Southern California in the national semifinals. The 2008 co-National Player of the Year would have been a senior this spring, and with all but one starter returning from last year’s national champions, the Nittany Lions figured to be the favorite to repeat.

“At times I wanted to go into the locker room and change and go out on the court with them,” Anderson said of watching the matches in Provo, Utah. “But it was nice to watch the team as an alumni.”

The Nittany Lions also had the whole season to get used to his absence and did not worry about what was missing when they got to the Brigham Young campus.

“You can’t look back at that right now,” senior middle hitter Max Holt said before the semifinal. “You kind of forget about him being in there.”

Instead, the West Seneca, N.Y., native chose to play professionally in Seoul, South Korea, for the Hyuandi Capital Skywalkers of the Korean Volleyball League. He led the Skywalkers to a first-place finish in the regular season, but they lost to the Samsung Bluefangs 3-1 in a best-of-five championship series.

While he had traveled quite a bit with the Nittany Lions, with several junior levels of U.S. programs and while playing club, actually living in a foreign country was definitely something new.

“It was an eye-opener, kind of like your first year in college,” Anderson said. “The first couple weeks were kind of normal for me. I’m kind of used to going to different countries and playing volleyball for a couple weeks, then coming back home. This time I stayed for another eight months.”

Making the situation more awkward was being an extremly tall American in a very homogeneus East Asian nation. When he would walk down the street, he was often recognized.

“They’d kind of go a little crazy on me,” Anderson said. “They’d recognize me and come over, want to shake my hand and take a picture. It’s kind of like a movie star deal.”

He would sometimes be accosted by fans on the Penn State campus, but more often it was a far more casual situation.

“I just play volleyball,” he said. “It’s not like I make millions of dollars making movies. But it was cool.”

The other new experience — in addition to strange surroundings, very little English spoken and unique food — was being paid to play as the hired gun on a roster otherwise filled with Koreans.

“The team treated me as an investment, not really as a player,” Anderson said. “They wanted me to be happy, but they wanted me to do everything in my power to be the best I could be, which is good, but at times they were a little bit too controlling.”

Now, the national team is putting him up in an apartment in Anaheim, where he is among the 19 players on the roster for the World League. Anderson was with the team as it started the season Saturday at the Netherlands.

He also has had some Penn State friends to hang out with in Anaheim — current Nittany Lions Will Price and Max Lipsitz and former players Nate Meerstein and Max Holt, who are all members of the U.S. A2 team, which will be playing in the Pan American Cup beginning Monday in Mexico.

It is all part of his life as a professional volleyball player, a life that he signed up for, and one he would not change.

“It’s a blast,” he said. “It’s super fun.”

Gordon Brunskill covers Penn State volleyball for the Centre Daily Times. He can be reached at 231-4608 or gbrunski@centredaily.com.

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