ROCK in a HARD PLACE : U.S. Volleyball Player Angela Rock Is Easier to Live With These Days, but She’d Still Rather Be Starting

The cruelest cut occurs every morning at practice for Angela Rock.

That is when and where the line is drawn: “Starters on this side, everyone else over there.”

This unforgiving reminder, couched in the form of a coach’s simple instruction, tells Rock that not only is she no longer the most valuable player on the U.S. women’s volleyball team, she is not even a starter.

For the first time since she joined the U.S. team in 1985 after her senior season at San Diego State, Rock is a regular member of “everyone else.” It is a group she never had any intention of joining. Ordinary has never been her way.

“At first, I was real bitter,” Rock said. “I wanted to play. I didn’t get it. What made someone better than me? I didn’t understand.

“I’d rather start. Who wouldn’t? Everyone’s goal is to be a starter. That’s my goal. That hasn’t changed. After being a starter for three years, I had to learn a new role. But just because I’ve kind of gotten used to it, that doesn’t mean I like it.”

Her words are to the point, but they are spoken more with determination than with malice. It is an important distinction in understanding the change in Rock. Once she was a rebellious, sometimes uncoachable player, whose contentious ways were so objectionable that they led SDSU Coach Rudy Suwara to briefly cut her from his team after her junior season.

“I was real serious,” Suwara says. “I wanted her gone.”

With this as background, is there any wonder that the whole San Diego-based U.S. team was watching anxiously to see how Rock would react when her new part-time role began to take shape this spring?

Initially, Rock behaved as her reputation said she might.

“She would just glare at the people over on the other side,” said Cathy Noth, a reserve setter who joined the team with Rock in 1985. “She didn’t know what to do. For a period of time, she was just angry. Then she realized, ‘Hey, if I can come in off the bench and play well, that might progress into a starting role.’ ”

Chances are that won’t happen. Rock played so well as a reserve in a recently completed, five-game series against East Germany that U.S. Coach Taras (Terry) Liskevych has no intention of restoring Rock to starter.

“Angela is playing her best coming off the bench,” Liskevych said. “Why change it?”

That leaves Rock in a predicament. If she wants to become a starter again, she must play well when she gets the chance. But the better she plays coming in as a reserve, the more Liskevych is convinced that is Rock’s best role for the team.

“It’s kind of like a Catch-22,” she said.

Her adjustment has been eased somewhat because it was former UCLA All-American Liz Masakayan, her best friend on the team and her partner on the beach volleyball circuit, who beat her out of her starting outside hitter position.

By moving Rock to the bench, the starting team gains Masakayan’s strong defensive abilities. But, more important, Rock provides Liskevych with an important ingredient his team was missing--a dynamic player off the bench to match up against such power teams as Cuba, East Germany and the Soviet Union.

Not only is Rock one of the team’s best hitters and jumpers, but she recently has developed a jump serve, which, although, common among the men is a rarity in women’s international volleyball.

“Angela is the kind of player who can come in and turn a match around,” Suwara said. “She is the only player Terry has who has that ability. She is capable of coming in and being the outstanding player on that team. That’s the kind of power she has. She has that sheer determination and the ability to hit the ball so darn hard.”

Still, Rock does not find discussing her reduced role an easy subject. Though she answered such questions willingly and with patience during a recent interview, there were small signs--such as the deep sigh that preceded her answer when the topic was broached--that reveal the hurt just under the surface.

But a heart-felt sigh is quite a different reaction from the way Rock might have reacted only a few years ago, when she might have lashed out at coaches and teammates.

A talented but raw player when she came to SDSU, Rock had been a handful from the start. She did not quietly accept splitting playing time as a freshman. She objected when other players, several of them All-Americans, played a more prominent role on her early Aztec teams. She feuded with the older players.

“That was the old Angela,” Suwara said. “This is a new Angela.”

At 24, with plans to enter a career in firefighting after volleyball, Rock realizes she has matured. No longer is she so quick to challenge a coach or teammate in public. She has learned to be more discreet.

“It was a repetitive lesson,” she said. “I don’t think I learned it overnight because (mistakes) still happen. It took me a long time to figure out it was me and not them.”

First, Suwara’s suspension rattled her outlook. Then, she slowly developed a strong mutual respect with Liskevych.

“A lot of people may have a hard time understanding Angela at first because she is someone who speaks her mind, and you have to get used to that,” Liskevych said. “But you do learn to understand that Angela does care about other people and the team.

“She is a good conscience for a lot of people because she might question something others are afraid to do. I don’t want players who are questioning everything we do, but blind allegiance isn’t good, either.”

Learning that the individual within her must frequently yield to the team around her might be the toughest assignment Rock faced in sticking with the U.S. team.

Making it has been nothing less than an obsession for Rock. Soon after she was introduced to the sport as a junior at El Toro High School, she was outside an exhibition match in Anaheim snapping photographs of the U.S. team. It was then that she became determined to someday be a member.

When her time came after a successful tryout in February 1985, the U.S. team was at a low point. Almost the entire team that had won a silver medal at the 1984 Olympics had retired, and Liskevych was rebuilding from scratch.

Rock, with her powerful striking ability and team-leading 33-inch vertical leap, quickly established herself, earning the team MVP award in her first year. She was one of the successes in what otherwise was a time of great turmoil in the U.S. program.

Players came and went. The team finished 10th in the 1986 World Championships, its worst finish since 1974. Liskevych found himself having to defend his more relaxed coaching method in light of the success of his demanding predecessor, Arie Selinger.

But after a 26-35 record last season, the U.S. team has come together. It is 20-6 in 1988, and on Friday it defeated East Germany in four games to take the five-match series, 4-1. The U.S. team seems poised to contend for an Olympic medal in Seoul in September. As of now, Rock is one of only five remaining players from Liskevych’s original tryout camp.

She endured where others failed. Her determination was unwavering.

“No way I was going to quit,” she said. “I didn’t care what was going on. I set my mind on this. No way I would consider leaving before the Olympics.”

Rock has committed too much to this dream to let the disappointment of losing a starting job change her sights. Hers is not only a desire for an Olympic medal but a pure love for the sport.

“Volleyball is so diverse,” Rock said. “There are so many different things that make it great. You have to bang the ball hard, and you have to be real gentle with the set, and passing is control. It’s so intricate.”

Volleyball is power and subtleness to Rock. Those are the same qualities that can make her a puzzle.

At 5-feet 9-inches tall, she is among the shortest players on the U.S. team. But her bench-press best of 215 pounds is 45 pounds better than any of her teammates.

Her hammer-like spikes make her among the most fearsome hitters on the U.S. team and give off an aura of power, but until recently her fear of the ocean kept her on the beach.

She has since overcome that enough to give surfing a try, but even a one-time fear seems strangely out of character for Rock.

A self-proclaimed tomboy as a teen-ager who used to ride skateboards to build up her legs, Rock has seen the perception of such behavior change rapidly.

“For a long time it wasn’t right for women or girls to be super energetic and athletic,” she said. “Now it is kind of the in thing to do--to be fit.”

Suwara, too, has seen attitudes begin to change.

“Some people when they think of Angela picture her in coveralls with a wrench hanging out of her pocket,” he said, laughing. “What they don’t see is she can be just flat-out charming at times.

“Society is changing, and we are accepting stronger women. But Angela, because she is a very strong personality and is not afraid to step out and be different, is still affected in our society.”

Sometimes her feistiness gets Rock in trouble. But in the three years they have been together, Liskevych has come to understand, and even appreciate, this drive inside Rock. It is a quality that, though sometimes hard to control, can be inspiration within his team.

“To be a successful team, we have to be like Americans,” Liskevych said. “And Americans are individuals. That is the fiber and strength and core of this country. Certainly, Angela is a great example of that.”