One night seven years ago, at the age of 14, senior Gonzalo Quiroga of the UCLA men’s volleyball team sealed his future with a handshake.
That night, Quiroga’s father, Daniel, came to discuss his son’s future with volleyball. While Quiroga’s older brother declined education at a university and began playing professionally in Italy straight after high school, Daniel Quiroga had different plans for his younger son. These plans would decide Gonzalo Quiroga’s future volleyball career.
Daniel Quiroga told his son that he would go to college in America, get a full scholarship and get a degree while playing volleyball. He told Gonzalo Quiroga he had to, at the very least, give it a shot. After all, Gonzalo Quiroga had already played for the Argentine youth national team and would be eagerly welcomed back should his college career not work out.
“I was like sure, let’s do it,” Gonzalo Quiroga said. “I shook his hand as a sign. Even though I didn’t feel like it changed my whole future, it did. I committed to my dad and said yes, I’m gonna do it. I wasn’t 100 percent sure that I was going to successfully get a degree, but I decided I was going to try.”
Now, almost a decade later, Quiroga is preparing to walk at graduation with the rest of his graduating teammates. After finishing up two more classes online at home over the summer, he will graduate with a political science degree. He will spend only a few days at home in San Juan, Argentina, before moving on to the next step in his volleyball career in Buenos Aires practicing with the Argentinian national team coaches, as he has been doing since his youth.
Quiroga spent his college years playing volleyball as an outside hitter for UCLA during the school year and, playing and training with the youth national team in Argentina during breaks. The professional edge and competitive mentality Quiroga developed during his years playing for the Argentine youth national team helped to make him a consistent team player during UCLA’s highly inconsistent 2014 season.
“It was definitely a challenging season,” said senior middle blocker Spencer Rowe, Quiroga’s roommate since sophomore year. “There were a lot of things we didn’t see coming. A lot of people played multiple positions, so that was difficult.”
Instead of allowing a season full of position changes and injuries to ruin his team’s morale, Quiroga kept the team focused by using injured players as motivators to keep his team working hard.
“I teach by example. I say, ‘Hey, Spencer twisted his ankle and he is still working hard to get back into it, so let’s do it.’ I feel that creates good pressure on the teammates to remind them that it’s not the end of the world. It’s just an ankle, so go for it. Do it again,” said Quiroga.
Growing up in a family of volleyball players and playing for the youth national team sparked an intense competitive spirit in Quiroga, which he also used during this season to keep both himself and his teammates focused. To spice things up, Quiroga quickly became known for his bets. Occasionally at practice, he approached his teammates throughout the season and bet them small incentives, like bottles of Coke, that he would win a point or score higher. These small competitions within practice inspired his teammates to come together to compete.
“Even if you put a little price on it, if you put an incentive on it, people will just go for it and try really hard, because it’s not anymore about losing volleyball, it’s your pride,” Quiroga said.
While the scoring, tactics and plays are the same no matter what level volleyball is played at, the mentality of professional volleyball players is vastly different than that of UCLA volleyball players. Many college players do not go on to play professionally, but professional volleyball players devote their entire lives to improving their game.
“Here even though it’s not professional, players are still trying to get better and get good at volleyball, but there are a lot of players that are probably not going to keep playing volleyball,” Quiroga said. “They’re just here to get a degree and play volleyball and have fun, but at the same time they are not taking it as seriously as they are back home.”
In contrast, Quiroga treated every practice at UCLA as a professional practice and hoped to pass this mentality down to the current and incoming freshmen.
“The freshmen coming in next year have no idea,” said assistant coach Brad Keller. “I feel it was really good for these freshmen to have a taste of who he is and what he’s like and what volleyball really is to him.”
During the postseason, Quiroga has been trying to finish out his last four classes at UCLA strong before heading home to Argentina later this month. After practicing with the national team in Buenos Aires this summer, he hopes to make the roster for the world championships in September, when teachers and classes will be replaced with new teammates and rigorous daily practices.
“Once I’m done here and go play professionally, it’s just going to be about volleyball, where here I feel it’s more about life,” he said.