She Feels the Weight of Her Own Talents : Volleyball: Even injured, Gracie Schutt is the player upon whom the San Diego State volleyball team depends.

With a knapsack of books on her back and a bag of ice taped tightly to her left knee, San Diego State’s Gracie Schutt winds her way up the hill past Aztec Bowl to the quad area where she eventually will meet her husband of 18 months.

Dressed casually in post-practice shorts and shirt, Schutt is describing her 1988 visit to San Diego--her first--when a passing student notices the striking 5-foot-11 Texas native and the bulging ice pack strapped to her knee.

“Can I carry you?” he asks.

The offer, coming on a college campus and not a construction site, seems innocent enough. Schutt glances back and laughs.

If he only knew. Schutt, co-captain of SDSU’s women’s volleyball team, has carried herself, and others, through plenty.

“We made the mistake of being totally dependent on her,” said SDSU Coach Rudy Suwara, determined to weave the Aztecs into a co-dependent unit. “We’d fall apart without her. Somehow, we got in the habit of waiting for her to pick up the team and carry it.”

That was at the beginning of this year.

After losing only one key player from a team that upset Brigham Young in the first round of the NCAA playoffs last year, the Aztecs, with five returning starters, were optimistic about the 1991-92 season. But various problems, including a rash of injuries to all but one of Suwara’s six starters, have left SDSU with a 7-9 record going into its Western Athletic Conference opener against sixth-ranked BYU tonight at Peterson Gym.

Included among the walking wounded is Schutt, the Aztecs’ junior outside hitter who has played in 61 of 62 games and is the team leader in kills (250), kill attempts (675) and service aces (30). During a summer of international competition, Schutt aggravated an earlier anterior cruciate ligament injury.

As a member of the United States’ National “B” team, Schutt, 21, played in the World University Games in England and the Pan Am Games in Cuba, a tour that began in Colorado July 1 and ended Sept. 19 when she returned to San Diego.

Schutt plays through the injury, which Suwara said was the only downside of a summer experience that enriched her in many ways.

“I think she’s more confident,” he said. “It was a very valuable experience. Ultimately, she’ll be better because of it. The fact that she came back hurt, an average person would have surgery and taken the year off, but not Gracie. She’s tough. She keeps right on going. I know she must have been advised not to play, but ultimately, it’s the player’s decision and she says, ‘I’m playing.’ ”

Schutt said she probably will have arthroscopic surgery at season’s end, no sooner. Until then, she is in a pressure cooker she helped create.

Carolyn Kaspar, the Aztecs’ other co-captain and a teammate last year, said a player of Schutt’s caliber can’t help but feel the weight of winning stick to her shoulders.

“I think she does (feel the pressure),” said Kaspar. “Anyone would in that position, because we know what she can do. She’s such a great player. We can feel when she’s not on, and we worry about it. But she’s working her way out of that. She’s said, ‘Hey, I’m just going to play my game.’ She knows she can’t play for five other people.”

She doesn’t intend to.

“Maybe they are dependent on me,” Schutt said, “but they have to understand that it’s a pressure that I have to perform well.”

Much is expected of those given much, and Schutt was no exception. Growing up in El Paso, with three sisters, a brother and parents in a Spanish-speaking household, Schutt realized at a young age that she was a gifted athlete and that sports could be the ticket to a better life.

“My mother wanted my sisters to go to college, but they didn’t want to,” she said. “My two older sisters weren’t bad, but they were kind of troublemakers. I knew early on that I was going to make something of myself.”

Schutt’s parents recently bought land in Chaparral, N.M., where they are both factory workers.

“I knew I could get an education if I could play well,” said Schutt, who plans to teach elementary school and eventually coach at the college level. “If I could excel in one thing, I knew that I could do something with it.”

At first, she played basketball at Ysleta High, in El Paso’s lower valley, but soon discovered a real knack for volleyball.

“I was a lot better at volleyball,” she said. “You know how there’s always one kid who stands out.”

Enough so that Gracie Santana was recruited by Texas Tech, where she met Bill Schutt, one of the program’s assistant coaches. After her freshman year, the entire coaching staff was replaced, including Bill Schutt, a graduate student whom Gracie finally summoned the courage to ask out.

“I really liked him,” she said. “Finally I just called and asked him out.”

This began a courtship that traversed the continental United States. Bill Schutt went off to Newport, R.I, to attend the Navy’s Officers Candidate School and Gracie enrolled at Grossmont College. To pay for classes and out-of-state tuition, she helped Colleen Suwara, Rudy’s wife, coach Grossmont’s volleyball team in 1989.

Schutt had decided with the coaching changes not to return to Lubbock. After all, Rudy Suwara had offered her a scholarship, but Texas Tech wouldn’t sign her release. She had to lose a year of eligibility before she could play at SDSU in 1990.

“I just helped Colleen, played grass tournaments and worked to pay tuition,” she said of her year at Grossmont. She helped the North team win a gold medal at the Olympic Festival in Minneapolis that summer.

Gracie and Bill, now stationed at Miramar Naval Air Station where he is an aerospace physiologist, were married April 14, 1990. Schutt laughed when asked how marriage changed her life.

“He’s made me a better player,” she said. “If I have a bad game, he reminds me to put it behind me. If I have a good game, he’ll tell me ‘Nice game,’ but there’s always something I can do better. It helps me not to get cocky.”

Marriage has added some built-in stability to Schutt’s life as well.

“This is going to sound funny,” she began, “but you know how some women worry about when they’re going to get a boyfriend? I know there’s someone who cares for me, who’s there to support me and who’s always there for me.”

It hasn’t always been that way for Schutt.

“We’ve gone through some hard times as a family, but we’re really close,” she said. “When I was young, (my mom) wasn’t always there for me. She had to work. As children, we want the perfect family, mom and dad together, everyone happy, until you realize that’s not always possible.”

But Schutt’s strong will to succeed has enabled her to make not all, but many things possible. Take for instance, her berths on the World University and Pan Am games teams.

When an injury created an opening at the U.S. “B” team camp, Illinois Coach Mike Hebert, also the World University and Pan Am games coach, called national women’s Coach Terry Liskevyck for consultation.

“We huddled as to what to do about it,” Hebert said. “In that particular position, we wanted a fiery, good defensive, ball-control player who would elevate the level of play. He said we have someone working out with us, why don’t I send her to camp?”

Schutt had been working out with the San Diego-based national team and was more than happy for a second chance to make the team. She had failed to make the cut of 16 at an earlier tryout in January.

“I didn’t have a good first tryout,” she said. “I was happy to get to try again.”

After six days of “incredibly intense competition,” Schutt made the final cut.

“She rarely started,” Hebert said, “but I wasn’t looking for a starter. I was looking for someone to come in and change the pace of the game. We had two matches in England that were pivotal, and winning them enable us to win the bronze. The first was against the Czechs, the second against the Soviet Union. She played in both. A few matches we seemed so out of, but we came back real strong. Gracie was a big part of that. She conducted the team with fortitude.”

Schutt was captain of both teams, which Hebert said was unusual for a non-starter.

“That’s a testament to the kind of person she is,” he said. “She was viewed in that vein.”

Even in practice, Schutt has fire in her eyes and ice in her voice.

“She takes defeat very personally, like someone’s degraded her,” Kaspar said. “Even in one-on-one drills, she wants to win. She won’t let a ball hit the court. She’ll be screaming at the coaches to hit it harder. The more challenging it is, the more she likes it.”