Weishoff Finds You Can Go Home Again

Paula Weishoff was only 22 when she was chosen most valuable player on the U.S. women’s volleyball team after it had won a silver medal during the 1984 Olympics in Long Beach.

Nevertheless, she was written out of the team’s plans when she left the program after the 1986 World Championships.

She returned to Europe, where she became a four-time MVP in an Italian professional league, and had no contact with the U.S. team for four years.

So, it came as quite a surprise when she took an overseas call 18 months ago from Greg Giovanazzi, an assistant to U.S. Coach Terry Liskevych.

His message?

Please come home.

“I really hadn’t thought of coming back,” Weishoff said this week. “When I left, the policy was, ‘Once you leave, you can’t come back.’ ”

Obviously, it had changed, but Weishoff, 30, still wasn’t sure if she wanted to drop everything to return to the United States.

Italy had become her home.

She had left the U.S. team , in part, because she felt so comfortable in Italy, where she had played since 1984.

“I was pretty much settled into my own ways,” she said. “I’m kind of a creature of habit, and I had my friends there. My life was there.”

Also, the U.S. team had fallen on hard times. Silver medalist at the 1984 Olympics, the U.S. had slipped to 10th in the 1986 World Championships.

“It was very hard to go from one of the top teams in the world to one that everybody is laughing at,” Weishoff said last summer.

The United States finished seventh in an eight-team field at the 1988 Olympics, but improved to third in the 1990 World Championships.

Still, it hadn’t yet qualified for the Barcelona Olympics.

So that call was made to Weishoff.

A month later, she broke up with her boyfriend, loosening her ties to Italy and leaving her more inclined to return to the United States.

“I said, ‘I’ve got to give it a go,’ ” said Weishoff, who returned to the U.S. team 14 months ago, helping it qualify for the Olympics last November at the World Cup.

“One of the things I said was, ‘Do I want this? Do I still have the desire? Can I do this?’ And if you answer yes to those questions, it was, ‘OK, I have to give it a try.’

“I really wanted to go to another Olympics, and that outweighed any fears or stubbornness on my part.”

Still committed to her team in Italy, Weishoff shuttled between Milan and San Diego four times last winter. Still, she worked her way into Liskevych’s starting lineup.

“She’s a great athlete,” Liskevych said of Weishoff, a 6-foot-1 hitter who played at West Torrance High and USC. “She’s technically very sound, and she plays with a lot of aggressiveness.

“She’s going to get a lot of balls set to her. Paula is definitely a focal point in our offense.”

Although Cuba is the favorite, Weishoff says that the United States is talented enough to challenge for a gold medal.

“I don’t know about which is the better team,” she said, comparing this year’s U.S. team to the one that lost to China in the gold-medal match at the 1984 Los Angeles Games. “But we have more depth than we had in ’84.

“In ‘84, we had seven or eight or nine players, where (this year), all 12 players could play and start. We can use any formation. We have a lot more flexibility.”