Recently in girls volleyball Category

Naperville North graduate Colleen Ward will begin her college volleyball career this fall at the University of Florida, and according to Prepvolleyball.com, she is part of the nation's top recruiting class.

The Web site released its Top College Recruiting Classes of 2008 list on Tuesday. Unless you are a registered user at the site, you will have to take our word for it.

In addition to The Sun's 2007 player of the year, Florida signed up Ward's Sports Performance teammate Kelly Murphy of Joliet Catholic, who was the Gatorade national player of the year.

Ward, a hard-working, powerful attacker ... could vie for a starting spot on the outside.

Strange fact that probably means nothing: None of the six players that signed with the Gators are from Florida. There are two players from Illinois, two from Colorado, one from Georgia and one from California.

The Sports Performance 18 Elite team won the Junior Volleyball Directors Association national chamionship on Monday in Louisville, Ky., to complete what coach Rick Butler believes is the first undefeated season in the 18 Open division.

Naperville North graduates Colleen Ward and Christine Wu, along with North seniors Julie Chin and Nrithya Sundararaman will now be able to say they went 83-0. Including last season, Sports Performance has a 120-match winning streak.

"We were all saying together, 'Just push out for 25 points because this is the last game we'll all be playing together.," Wu said. "It just hit us that ... we have one game left and we just want it to end well."

Kyushu Bunka Gakuen High School, the 11-time Japanese national girls volleyball champion which will play Sports Performance 18 Elite on Wednesday night, was once at the center of one of the most self-evident research studies known to man.

According to this abstract, 24 girls volleyball players from KBG were studied over the course of 11 months during 1988 and 1989. They were tested for body fat percentage, cardiorespiratory function, body composition and skin fold measurement.

Those results were compared to those of 16 players from another local school that had "second-class players." (In your face Nagasaki Prefecture!)