SPECIAL DELIVERY

The weight of the box, filled with letters from college coaches, was staggering.

Twenty-three pounds.

And that was only one of three similarly stuffed boxes in Tara Conrad’s closet.

Conrad, a senior middle blocker for the West Torrance High volleyball team, received recruiting letters from 120 schools.

One college sent photocopies of hundred-dollar bills. Another sent fake newspaper articles, with hypothetical headlines that screamed Conrad’s success.

Conrad opted for the college with the most laid-back approach. Then again, Stanford never has to recruit very hard. A simple snap of the fingers lures most high school volleyball players.

“I’ve wanted to go there since I was a freshman,” said Conrad, who never took an official visit.

She orally accepted a full scholarship on July 15--the same day the Stanford admissions office approved her application--and became one of the first major commitments in the nation, let alone California.

Conrad’s mail carrier was undoubtedly elated.

“She was always glad when she dropped our mail off because it lightened her load,” said Kathy Conrad, Tara’s mother.

Correspondence aside, Conrad appears to be the typical high school senior.

She drives a trendy car, makes her bed every other decade and, for better or worse, listens to the Spice Girls.

Conrad isn’t so typical with the way she delivers a kill or blocks an opponent’s attempt at the net.

There’s also the height thing: She’s an uncommon 6 feet 3.

“I’ve gotten the jokes all my life,” Conrad said. “I’m kind of used to it by now.”

She gave up soccer early in high school partly because she was too tall for a forward.

“At practice, you didn’t want to hurt anybody,” she said.

The soccer coach is still buzzing in her ear about coming back, and the basketball coach has plenty of ways to fill her free time once volleyball season ends.

For now, though, she’s pounding volleyballs for the Warriors, who won the Bay League title last year for the first time since 1978. Conrad isn’t just a block and kill machine.

“She’s all over the floor, she’s like a mop,” West Torrance Coach Mike Marconi said. “She’s just as mobile as anybody else on the court, and she does all the dirty work: Digging, jump-serving, passing.

“She’s one of the few volleyball players who can single-handedly dominate a game. I’m assuming some of the other kids in those circumstances would be terrible to deal with in terms of ego, but she’s not like that at all.”

Conrad isn’t afraid to raise her voice, which has been fine-tuned by solos and duets at her church.

She confers with Marconi almost every week on how the Warriors can improve and, at home, says what she is thinking.

“She has a pretty strong voice,” her father, Peb, said. “She’d probably be a good announcer.”

At the very least, she could be a contractor.

Over the summer, Conrad spent a weekend ripping down the pink and purple flowery wallpaper in her bedroom because “if [college] scouts came, they were going to think I was still in my childhood,” she said.

The scouts might not have minded. They were all present at April’s UC Davis Festival, a tournament stacked with elite club teams, when Conrad severely sprained her left ankle and tore a tendon. She blacked out from the pain, but the colleges didn’t stop calling.

College coaches are forbidden from commenting about recruits until Feb. 15, the official signing date, but they have plenty to say about Conrad.

“She’s solid all the way around,” said the coach of one top-25 team. . “She’s big, tall and strong. She’s a big kid who’s going to mature and grow.”

The ankle is still swollen and Conrad estimates that she is playing at 80% of her normal strength.

Her presence should be enough for another league title for the Warriors (9-0), ranked third in the Southern Section Division II-AA poll.

But Conrad has higher goals, namely improving upon last year’s postseason showing. West Torrance lost to Righetti in the second round of the Division II-AA playoffs.

“I can’t stand to lose,” Conrad said. “I get that from my mom. She’s like me, always on the edge of her seat, tense or nervous as if something’s not going right.”

Conrad constantly brawled with her older brother, Donny, 19, when she was younger. But the sibling rivalry has become sibling revelry.

Conrad even checks out her brother’s band, Deviates, which jams in the family garage almost weekly. She does make one concession: “Earplugs,” she joked.

Conrad’s not-so-secret desire is to play outside hitter, where she could hammer away at the ball on offense and have fewer defensive responsibilities.

Every coach, realizing that height is best used in the middle, has the same response.

Said Conrad: “They’re like, ‘No!’ ”

Then again, maybe they should listen. Nearly 70 pounds of correspondence can’t be all wrong.