Simone Antwi Poised to Tap Potential at Florida

There are plenty of measurements in sports.

Basketball hoop – 10 feet from the floor.

Pitcher’s mound – 60 feet, 6 inches from home plate.

40 yard dash – if you can catch a football and run it in 4.4 seconds, you’re a millionaire.

For South County senior volleyball star Simone Antwi, life is all about measurements.

Yes, she can touch 10-feet, 6-inches and almost dunk a tennis ball.

(She says touching the rim is no problem, but when she has a ball in her hand, her mind plays tricks on her and suddenly she has the hops of a man wearing cement shoes.)

From head-to-toe, she stretches a measuring tape 6-feet, 2-inches (that’s 74 inches, or 188 centimeters if you like the metric system).

She also stretches the limits of a 24-hour period (or 1,440 minutes) seemingly cramming 30 hours (or 1,800 minutes) of activity into a single day.

Antwi, a Fairfax Station resident, wakes up every day at 6:30, showers, gets something to eat and is out the door by 7:20 for school. Last Tuesday, she was still at practice, with her Virginia Elite club volleyball team at Hoop Magic in Chantilly, at 9:30 p.m.. Tack on 40 minutes to get home, and she’s not done studying and in her PJs and ready for bed until at least 1 a.m.

How does she do all that on less than six hours of sleep?

“I catch up on it in class,” she says with a laugh and a big smile.

The way she says it, it sounds more like a calculated strategy -- the micro-naps helping her get through the day -- than she’s getting away with something.

Don’t think she answered the question quickly, either, and wished she hadn’t let that one slip. In a 20-minute conversation, she spends a good couple of seconds measuring each answer.

Antwi’s busy measuring things after school, too.

She knows all about how many steps it takes to run 100-meters, 200-meters and 400-meters, working out with the Stallions’ track team after school to stay in shape.

“I try to stay with the sprinters so I can push myself when I’m running,” she says.

And the practice with Virginia Elite was all about measurements, too. Joe Ziegler had the players counting:  the number of bumps in a row without the ball hitting the ground, the number of serves in play while running from one side of the court to another for seven minutes, and the number of push-ups to do and how many seconds to hold a plank – in an effort to build up their accountability for unforced errors.

It’s a workout-filled day that might make Michael Phelps wilt.

And it’s exactly what Antwi wants right now, because she knows college volleyball in the SEC, at a program often ranked in the NCAA top-10, will be no cakewalk. She’s trying to prepare herself to be a factor this fall, not just a member of the team.

For a player whose physical presence is the first thing opponents, teammates and scouts notice, her goal is to become even more physical over the next couple of months.

Mary Wise, the Gators’ volleyball coach, says the speed and strength of Division I players is often the biggest shock in store for freshman college volleyball players. It won’t be as much of a hurdle for Antwi, one of the strongest players in the region. But Wise can’t wait to get her recruit into the school’s weight-training program.

“This is not someone who has been on any kind of long-term conditioning program,” Wise said over the phone last week. “There’s no telling how high she’s going to be able to jump-reach [after we’ve worked with her].”

Julia Kastner, a Division I-bound athlete from South County herself (softball at Temple University), said when Antwi would get the ball during soccer games as a 12-year-old, everyone on the field would cower.

“She’s 6-2 and she’s jacked,” said Kastner, a guard who played with Antwi on the South County basketball team.

Everyone at South County has nothing but praise for Antwi. Classmates and coaches say teachers and fellow students love her. She was voted homecoming queen (another measurement). But the most popular comment of all is that even though Antwi was a member of the volleyball All-Region team, a second-team All-Stater (the top ranking for a middle hitter) and recorded a double-double in basketball nearly every game, she hasn’t scratched the surface of her volleyball ability.

In an era where kids are playing on AAU and club teams as fifth-graders, Antwi was only introduced to volleyball as an eighth-grader in gym class.

People talk about her potential in hushed tones.

Dave Prahl, Antwi’s high school coach and a gym teacher, introduced her to the game in eighth grade.

He said he knew her as a basketball prospect at that point in their relationship.

“How high can you jump? Do you think you can touch the rim?” he remembers asking.

“I don’t know, I think so,” Antwi said.

“So as an eighth-grader, she could touch the rim,” Prahl said. “That’s pretty impressive.”

While Antwi says she doesn’t really remember the story, she hears people telling it all the time.

So the physical was there. But there were challenges.

Antwi wasn’t too coordinated. And she didn’t know the game. It’s not often a player with all-state potential plays on the freshman team, but that’s where Antwi found herself four years ago.

She had a lot to catch up on.

“I liked the thinking and competitiveness,” Antwi said. “But I hated (volleyball) at first. It was frustrating. I felt so behind.

“I didn’t like sucking.”

But Antwi’s parents Sophia and Sam were there to boost their daughter.

“My first year of club, my Mom would be like: ‘You’re fine. You’ll catch up to them soon.’” Antwi remembers the conversations in the car. At the kitchen table.“’You’re learning. It’s hard’. But they both told me I would get there one day.”

And now that she’s there, she’s leaving.

Antwi, who will play this spring with Virginia Elite, graduate from South County in June, and shortly thereafter head to summer school in Gainesville, is already picturing herself on campus.

“It’s a big transition, so I want to get used to the school,” she says between tweets from coaches whistles on the court over her shoulder. “I’m really excited. I’m nervous, but that’s normal.”

She’ll miss South County, too. She’ll remember something about every game she played for the Stallions, but the football players attending games wearing short-shorts and Afro wigs, taunting opponents may be her best memory.

Kastner says she’ll remember Antwi’s volleyball-style last-second tip-in to win a tournament game as a junior.

Antwi is proud of the program she nurtured in Lorton, and they way they nurtured her.

 “(I’ll remember) the whole community at the school being so supportive of me and my teammates at every game,” noting the tradition-building going on at the county’s newest school. “They don’t have that established tradition, but I feel as time goes on, it will get a lot better.”

At Florida, Antwi joins a program that likes to measure itself, too. The Gators are coming off a 29-2 record and a No. 1 seeding in the NCAA tournament. All-Americans are the norm, not the exception. The challenge is to carry on a long-standing tradition which is its own kind of measurement.

 “The way Florida runs its program, and the kind of players it produces, I feel like I’ll fit in perfectly,” Antwi says.

You get the feeling she’ll measure-up there, too.