Swanner Rules the Court After Leaving Fields : Volleyball: After being cut from soccer team, Irvine senior has turned himself into one of the county’s best players.

Chris Swanner had some freshman year at Irvine High School. Got cut from the soccer team. Rode the bench for the junior varsity volleyball team.

Here was a kid who had dedicated the past nine years to youth soccer, building a reputation as a pretty aggressive sweeper. And here he was, picking splinters on the lonesome pine during a volleyball match.

Swanner, a 6-foot-3 outside hitter, grins as he tells this story. He can afford to now that he’s a senior and one of the top volleyball players in Orange County.

Soccer is now nothing more than a weekend hobby for Swanner, who has led the Vaquero volleyball team to a 9-0 start and the No. 2 ranking in Orange County.

“I was really big on soccer as a kid, and I didn’t play any club volleyball,” he said. “I just kind of latched onto volleyball after I was cut from the soccer team.”

The switch of sports didn’t get off to a resounding start. A newcomer to volleyball, Swanner spent most of his first year watching from the bench.

“The sport seemed really complicated,” he said. “It was a fast game, just like soccer. But in soccer, you were running around all the time. Volleyball was much more technical.”

Learning those basic skills wasn’t easy for Swanner, especially when he was playing with, and against, players who had mastered them years before through club teams and clinics.

“The summer after my freshman year made a big difference for me,” he said. “I played in a summer league down in San Clemente every Friday night, and I began to get better.”

He also started working out on his own. He and teammate Brad Zimmerman bought a recreation volleyball set, fixing the net to posts that were weighted down with bags of cement.

The players worked out every day in their yards. Swanner’s passing and blocking improved. He hit fewer balls out of bounds.

By the time his sophomore volleyball season started, Swanner had earned a starting job at left-side hitter.

Not with the junior varsity. The varsity.

Swanner moved to right-side hitter as a junior, and, under Coach Mark Mednick, he began developing into one of the county’s better players. He helped the Vaqueros reach the quarterfinals of the Southern Section 4-A tournament with a second-round upset of second-seeded Huntington Beach.

“Nothing ever fazes him,” Mednick said. “He’s very intense, and a very focused player.”

Case in point: During a match last season, Swanner tried to dig an unblocked ball spiked by an Arcadia player.

“It was a hard one right off my face,” Swanner said. “The guy got a clean shot down the line and it just wrapped around my face and bounced off.”

The shot stunned Swanner, but he wasn’t about to let anyone know it. Especially the Arcadia player.

“I just got up and started clapping,” he said. “I wanted to get us pumped up.”

Swanner has dealt a few punishing blows himself.

“If I’m having a bad day I like to take it out on the ball,” he said. “It makes the rest of the day a lot better.”

Unless, of course, you’re trying to block him. Coaches and players consider him one of the county’s hardest hitters, and he regularly hits through blocks.

“He’s as good as anybody I’ve seen in the county this season,” Newport Harbor Coach Dan Glenn said. “He hits a heavy ball, and the kids have a hard time digging it.

“He hits as hard as anybody I’ve seen, and I’ve got a couple of guys who can hit it hard.”

Volleyball takes up much of Swanner’s time these days. But he still finds days to get away for snow skiing and surfing, two of his favorite hobbies, and a little soccer now and then.

But his future is hitting a ball over a net. Coaches from top-ranked Cal State Long Beach and UC San Diego have shown interest.

“It’s hard to believe how all this turned out,” he said. “When I first started playing, I thought of it as a good way to take out my aggressions.”