The Whole Family Follows Her Dream

Steve Sudduth was driving through the streets of Yorba Linda and he was angry.

He had just attended a meeting at the CIF Southern Section headquarters in Cerritos, where his appeal for his daughter’s volleyball eligibility at Esperanza High had been denied.

His daughter, Jessica, had moved from her family’s house in Hesperia just before her junior year in 1995. She moved in with a family in Yorba Linda in order to be closer to her Tustin-based private volleyball club and transferred to Esperanza.

For the previous year, the Sudduths had driven Jessica from Hesperia two hours each way several times a week to practice with the club. During that year, Jessica, then a sophomore at Hesperia High, vomited often from fatigue. They decided if she lived closer to the club, it would ease the strain.

But moving to Yorba Linda to play for the club also meant sitting out a year of varsity volleyball.

Under CIF rules, a transfer player is only eligible at the new school if the family has moved into the new school’s district or if the player can prove there is a “hardship”--such as child abuse--in living with his or her own family and has gained a court-appointed legal guardian living in the new district.

A Southern Section committee ruled that Sudduth’s four-hour commute to play for the club and her subsequent vomiting from lack of sleep did not constitute a hardship.

“That’s not a hardship, that’s parent choice,” Southern Section Commissioner Dean Crowley said recently.

A few hours after the hearing, Sudduth called her mother, Amanda, in Hesperia.

“Where’s dad?” Jessica asked.

“Looking for a house,” Amanda said. “They [made him angry] and now he’s going to move.”

Jessica was shocked.

Said Steve: “I just felt like, God, this is America. It just didn’t seem right to me. It wasn’t the end of the world by any means, but it just didn’t seem right. Everybody else was playing and I wanted to do everything in my power to help her do that.”

Steve and Amanda leased their 2,800-square foot home in Hesperia, uprooted Steve’s contracting business, and moved into a 1,300 square-foot condominium in Yorba Linda. They dragged along their other children, Justin, 15, Brittany, 9, and Trisha, 6.

Sudduth played her first game for Esperanza last season in the Orange County Championships, about a week into the season. She is a senior and the Aztecs are ranked fourth in the county.

“Financially, it’s still hard. Club is very expensive and moving your business, you lose a lot of your contacts,” Amanda said. “Steve and I look at each other and we go, ‘What the hell are we doing? This is absolutely nuts.’ ”

But it worked. This summer, a year after the Sudduths moved to Yorba Linda to support Jessica’s volleyball, she was selected to participate in a junior national team camp at Colorado Springs.

“When you find somebody like Jess, she was just real, real passionate about doing this, and she did [the long commute] for a year like a trouper kid,” Steve said. “It’s one of those things where you can’t help but be real supportive of that kind of dream.”

Sudduth’s dream began when she was introduced to basketball and volleyball by a physical education teacher who noticed her on the playground as an eighth-grader in 1992. It was difficult not to notice Sudduth--she was 6 feet tall.

After playing in the 14-and-younger division as an eighth-grader for a local club in Hesperia, Sudduth was hooked.

“That’s when I knew I wanted to play this,” she said. “I thought, ‘Man, I want to know as much as I can about the sport. I was like, ‘God, I love this.’ ”

Her parents watched her confidence soar. Before volleyball, Sudduth was a member of her junior high drill team--but she never quite fit in because of her height.

“You felt for the kid. She was stooping over,” Steve said. “Then you see her [after joining a volleyball team] and she is going, ‘You think I can be 6-2 or 3 or 4?’ ”

She was a natural athlete. As a freshman in 1993, she played for an 18-and-under club team and also started on the varsity volleyball and basketball teams at Hesperia High.

By the time she was a sophomore in 1994--with only two years of volleyball experience--the awards started piling in: All-Citrus Belt League, All-Southern Section Division III.

That fall, Sudduth and her father were flipping through Volleyball magazine and saw pictures of some of the country’s top club teams. They saw a picture of Power, formerly called Magnum and based in Tustin.

Steve called former Magnum director Charlie Wade, University of Hawaii coach, and said he had a 6-2 daughter who wanted to play.

“He laughed at me,” Steve recalled. “He said, ‘We have about 12 kids who are 6-2. If you want to come on down these are our hours. What was your name again?’ ”

On tryout day, Sudduth’s mother, Amanda, packed the car for the 100-mile trip.

Just as they were exiting the freeway in Tustin, however, another car sideswiped theirs. They swerved off the road and up an embankment. Jessica and Amanda were not injured, but their car was smashed and had a flat tire.

As Amanda waited for a tow-truck, Jessica called Wade, who told them they were only 10 minutes away.

Amanda looked at her daughter incredulously--the driver’s side of their car was so smashed you could barely open the door. But she drove to the tryout anyway.

The former Magnum practice facility was impressive by most club standards. A well-stocked trophy case adorned the foyer. Sudduth was a raw talent--she didn’t even know what a basic 6-2 offense was.

The other girls already had finished trying out when Sudduth arrived, but Wade took one look at her and placed her on his top 16-and-under team, coached by Brian Hosfeld.

“I was totally excited to be there,” Sudduth said. “I was like, ‘This is a dream.’ ”

Sudduth’s parents agreed to support her dream.

Sudduth, then a sophomore, also played on the Hesperia basketball team, which meant that several times a week, one of her parents picked her up at basketball practice around 4 p.m. for the two-hour drive to Tustin for volleyball practice.

Sudduth did her homework in the car and often arrived home at midnight, all the time maintaining her 3.5 grade-point average. Sometimes, she called home from the car phone so the non-driving parent could have dinner ready as soon as she walked in the door. She fell asleep exhausted and was at school at 7 a.m. to do it again.

“It totally caught up to me by the end. I was putting out so much energy and so much driving and so [little] sleep. I don’t know how many times I threw up. Just [from] fatigue, pushing my body too hard,” she said.

That spring, her parents arranged her school schedule so she could miss first period and sleep a little more--which helped. But by then, the club volleyball season was in full swing, with practices every night and tournaments every weekend.

But the work paid off. That summer, her Magnum team placed fourth at the 1995 Junior Olympics in Orlando, Fla., and Sudduth was an All-American selection at middle blocker.

Hosfeld suggested she move in with a local family to avoid commuting the next season and teammate Trina Kightlinger’s family offered a room.

Sudduth invited several Hesperia coaches to her house to explain her decision.

“I didn’t want to just call them on the phone or just not show up,” she said. “I thought I owed them that much.”

Hesperia girls’ volleyball Coach Shari Kramer tried to convince her not to go.

“Athletes should be loyal to their high school teams instead of trying to grow up so fast, because girls of that caliber are going to have full rides [scholarships], they are going to be able to play [in college],” Kramer said.

This angered Sudduth.

“I wasn’t playing for the scholarship. I wanted to be the best I could be. Why settle for mediocre?” Sudduth said. “I think they really wanted me around in their program and then when I left it was bad for their program. I think they were just doing their job.”

A contingent of Hesperia athletic department personnel, including Kramer, attended the Southern Section hearing. They argued that Sudduth should be declared ineligible at Esperanza.

Sudduth’s objective in moving had nothing to do with high school volleyball, but Crowley said that didn’t matter.

“Why should Esperanza get a nugget player who has just made a choice to come to Orange County because she is involved in club volleyball?” Crowley said. “We’re trying the best we can and we’re not perfect, but we’re just trying to maintain some semblance of a level playing field.”

Steve got the impression the hearing was over before it began.

“They have a panel of three folks sitting up there and I couldn’t help feeling like this was a rigged deal,” he said. “I stood up and said, ‘If I move my family down here, is she eligible to play?’ ”

Sudduth has never regretted her decision to leave Hesperia.

“My living quarters are a lot smaller than they were, but it’s no big deal,” she said.

This summer, Sudduth’s 18-and-under Power team won the bronze medal at the Junior Olympics in San Jose and Sudduth again was an All-American selection.

“It was sooo cool,” she said. “That’s all I wanted. I was sooo happy. Just chillin’ with my medal.”

And in the stands, her supporting cast was cheering like crazy.