Nnamani passes volleyball tests

You wouldn’t figure someone with a Stanford degree in human biology -- the favored major of pre-meds -- would be thinking about any IQ issues.

And you wouldn’t figure that someone who was named national prep player of the year and then national college player of the year in her sport would have to work on her knowledge of the game.

Yet those are exactly the things Ogonna Nnamani thinks have improved in her game after a season of playing professional volleyball in the tough Italian League.

That made it worth being separated from her close-knit family in Bloomington, Ill.

And it also made her one of the players to watch on the 2008 U.S. Olympic women’s volleyball team that was announced Wednesday.

Four others on the team have California connections, including 6-foot-7 Laguna Hills native Tayyiba Haneef-Park and middle blocker Heather Brown of Yorba Linda, both of whom were members of the 2004 Olympic team. Two are making their first trip to the Games: middle blocker Jennifer Joines of Milpitas and libero Nicole Davis of Stockton.

“Sometimes you think you are doing things in vain, like being far from your family and not sure what is going to happen,” Nnamani said. “Now I feel I have really improved. I have a higher volleyball IQ, and I learned a lot tactically.”

Nnamani should be able to make more extensive use of those skills than she did at the 2004 Olympics, when she was the youngest member of a U.S. team that left Athens feeling it had underachieved.

Seen as a medal favorite, Team USA stumbled out of group play with a 2-3 record and lost to Brazil in the quarterfinals. Nnamani played in five of the six matches as a reserve.

“We learned our lesson well in 2004, that you need to have a good record in group play to get a better draw for the knockout rounds,” Nnamani said of a team that will go to Beijing ranked fourth in the world. The U.S. begins Olympic play on Aug. 9 against Japan.

A 6-foot-1 outside hitter, Nnamani began playing volleyball as an eighth-grader and dropped basketball in her junior year in high school to concentrate on volleyball. That choice shocked her parents until they became aware of the sport’s opportunities for college women.

“She was very good at basketball. She could dunk,” said her mother, Uzo.

Education is a priority in their family, though. So much so that Nnamani had to forgo extracurricular activities as a seventh-grader because she needed to catch up on schoolwork after a lengthy winter trip to visit relatives in Nigeria.

After taking two quarters off from Stanford to train for the 2004 Olympics, she crammed 18 to 20 course hours into each quarter the next year to graduate on time. Since graduation, she put off a likely career in medicine or public health to concentrate on volleyball.

Nnamani’s post-Olympic volleyball plans are uncertain.

“If Chicago gets the 2016 Olympics,” she said, “I will have to last until then.”

Smart way to think.

Philip Hersh reports on Olympic sports for The Times and the Chicago Tribune.