Bringing home a championship title is an accomplishment many athletes dream of. Megan Crush, a sophomore libero, tucked this under her belt with her first year as a member of AU’s volleyball team, as they won the Patriot League tournament in 2017. Winning in her freshman year put her life in a whirlwind of excitement, but it came to have a humbling effect on her and her future plans as an Eagle.
Born in Louisville, Kentucky, Crush was living in an environment rich with a love for volleyball.
“It was always kind of in my culture and the culture of Louisville to play volleyball at one point,” said Crush, who started playing in the fourth grade.
Crush attended Sacred Heart Academy, an all girls high school in Louisville. In the gym, almost tauntingly, a single state championship banner hung, reading only one date: 2003. The banner was always “staring [them] down” during every practice, until finally they decided to set a goal, Crush said.
Her team wanted to be the team that hung a second banner in their school’s gym. Sure enough, in Crush’s senior year, she and nine other seniors fought hard to achieve the goal that they set four years prior – a tearful victory in the state championship game.
Besides playing volleyball in high school, Crush was also a musician who had been playing piano from a young age, and she was an avid volunteer at her local convalescent center, where she worked with disabled kids. Volunteering was a requirement at her high school, but Crush took it upon herself to exceed the required amount of hours because of her passion for working with the children in the facility.
Crush’s freshman year at AU came with opportunity through devotion and hard work.
“I just wanted to work really hard at practices and try to earn playing time so that when my time came when I did get put in that I would make the most of it,” Crush said.
She successfully played 29 matches with seven starts in the 2017 season. With the help of her peers, Megan grounds herself and sets goals for improvement. Hoakelai Dawson, an AU volleyball alumna, passed along words of advice that have stuck with Crush.
“She instilled in me that you always have to work for what you have, and don’t take anything the coaches and the athletic department give us for granted,” Crush said.
Megan’s career took off on a high note from her championship win in high school to contributing to her college team’s Patriot League title win a year later. She humbles herself through the positive chemistry the team shares amongst each other and the coaches, both on and off the court.
