Better Late Than Never : Lane Peterson Is Hitting His Stride Playing Volleyball on a Global Scale

Those who saw Lane Peterson play sports at Newport Harbor High School will be at least mildly surprised to hear that Peterson is a member of the U.S. volleyball team that will play in the World University Games at Zagreb, Yugoslavia, next week.

The 6-foot 8-inch Peterson may have stood tall in high school, but he never stood out as an athlete.

He wasn’t good enough to start on the Sailors’ volleyball or basketball teams his senior year (1980-81), when he was still trying to come to terms with a body that had grown nine inches in 2 1/2 years.

But six years and four colleges later, it appears that Peterson, 24, finally has matured as an athlete.

He played well enough at a U.S. national team open tryout last year to be one of 50 volleyball players invited back to this year’s tryout at San Diego, May 7-10.

Olympic Coach Marv Dunphy and his assistants selected a group of players they thought would have a shot at making this Olympic team or the next and formed the World University team.

Though his chances of playing in the 1988 Olympics are slim, Peterson showed enough promise to be invited by Dunphy to work out with the national team in San Diego for five weeks during May and June.

“I’m a late bloomer,” Peterson said by telephone from Colorado Springs, where the World University team has been practicing for two weeks. “I was just an average volleyball player in high school--I didn’t even start playing until my junior year. But I felt I had a talent for it and knew I’d get a lot better.”

Lane’s twin brother, Robert, appeared to be the one shooting for the Olympics. It was Robert who was the star of Newport Harbor’s 1981 team, who had scholarship offers out of high school and who ended up on the Stanford team last year. But a shoulder injury prevented Robert from competing in the recent tryouts.

Lane, meanwhile, came from a college--Brigham Young University--that doesn’t even have an NCAA-sanctioned volleyball team. The Cougars do have an outstanding club team that defeated national powers USC, UCLA and Pepperdine this past season, but those were all nonleague matches.

Peterson is the only non-NCAA player on the World University team.

“No one even knew who I was at the tryouts,” Peterson said. “I made it here through a trap door in the basement.”

It was quite a long trip upstairs.

After he graduated from high school in 1981, Peterson spent a year at Cal State Long Beach before he went on a 1 1/2-year Mormon mission to Australia in 1982. He returned to Southern California in 1983 and for three semesters attended Orange Coast College, where he rowed for the Pirates’ crew.

Peterson transferred to the University of Utah in January 1985, but spent only two quarters there before moving on to BYU in the fall of 1985. He needs two more courses to graduate with a degree in international relations.

Peterson played volleyball at Long Beach and in Australia, but his biggest strides as an athlete came at Orange Coast. Until he rowed, sports had been strictly fun for him.

“I wish I could have been a better player in high school, but I had a lot of interests--I liked to play volleyball, basketball, scuba dive, body surf--lots of things,” he said. “I didn’t have to be the best because I didn’t derive my feeling of self-worth from volleyball.”

But crew exposed Peterson to an entirely different experience. Rowing tested him mentally and physically. It challenged his strength and endurance. It was the first time he had been really pushed by others and by himself.

“Crew was the turning point,” Peterson said. “It was the ultimate team sport, and I learned that I can push myself a lot harder than I thought I could. What I thought was my maximum capacity wasn’t.”

A more competitive Peterson took his new attitude to Utah but found the club team there to be lacking, thus prompting his transfer to BYU, where he developed into one of the Cougars’ best players last season.

But international volleyball, as Peterson has discovered, is on another plane, well above college club volleyball, and the transition hasn’t been easy. The moves that always worked at BYU don’t fare as well against such world-class players as Karch Kiraly and Steve Timmons.

“Psychologically, it’s a big difference coming from a program where you’re a standout to one where you’re one of the worst on the team,” Peterson said. “These guys are the best in the world. My skill level and confidence is not as high with the national team.”

Dunphy hopes that, with time and practice, Peterson will develop into an Olympian. At BYU, the team worked out only three days a week, 2 1/2 hours a day. The U.S. national team works out five days a week, four hours a day.

“He was in a situation where he needed to play eight days a week to catch up with the other guys,” Dunphy said. “I think he has the potential to be a good blocker, and he has good size. At our level, a good big man beats a good little man.”

Peterson won’t start on the World University team, which leaves for Yugoslavia today and begins play next Thursday, but he should receive plenty of playing time. And, although he has been frustrated by the competition lately, he does have his moments, and he is having a good time.

“It’s fun to have balls hit at you harder than they’ve ever come at you before and to still be able to deal with them,” Peterson said. “It’s fun going up against Kiraly and Timmons and blocking them every once in a while. It’s a good feeling to be with the best in the world and doing OK.”