SSU's Kristy Sather balances volleyball and teaching

It is 9:15 a.m. on a recent weekday and 19 first-graders in Kristy Sather’s class at Spring Creek Elementary School are learning about spiders.

Most of the 6-year-olds are properly sitting criss-cross applesauce and obeying the class rules (3. Keep our bodies to ourselves). Those calmly raising a hand are called on to ask a question. Among the more compelling: “Why do webs only catch small things and not big people?”

A few minutes later, Sather opens a book — yes, the pictures are real she assures one girl — and begins reading.

“Spiders don’t eat insects,” they soon discover. “They suck the juices out of them.”

This fact is greeted by a chorus of “Ewwws!” One boy, however, is delighted. “Yummy!” he says.

Welcome to the world of Sonoma State senior outside hitter Kristy Sather, 24, a first-grade teacher, a Division II volleyball player who has led the 15-4 Seawolves to their best start in school history and a graduate student with a 4.0 GPA taking eight units in SSU’s master’s program.

It is a non-stop existence filled with magic pebbles, walk-don’t-run reminders, lesson plans, consonant blending, ultrasound for an aching shoulder, practices, road trips to Cal State San Bernardino and Kinisielogy 410: Life Span and Motor Development, a Monday night class that ends at 8:40, about 13 hours after her day starts at Spring Creek.

Only five players in the California Collegiate Athletic Association average more kills per game than Sather. And none has taught more children the days of the week or the proper way to blow their noses.

“It’s funny to think I’m playing with a first-grade teacher,” said SSU freshman Taylor Krenwinkel, who, at 18, is six years younger than Sather. “When I think of my first-grade teacher, I don’t think of someone who can jump up and smash a volleyball in someone’s face.”

So how does Sather juggle her various worlds, with her only caffeine coming from one cup of tea a day?

A self-described perfectionist, she remains standing thanks to heaping amounts of drive and determination. And spreadsheets. Those help her account for each minute. Sather puts gas in her car, for example, on Sunday afternoons.

“I had to sit down and map out my life,” Sather said. “I had to say, ‘OK, this is when I study for this class. This will be when I do this.’ ... I’m sure I’ll look back in five years and say ‘What was I thinking?’”

She is, in effect, working at least two jobs. But she isn’t just punching the clock: She has a love affair with athletics and education.

As passionate as Sather is about volleyball, however, she left the sport five years ago and didn’t plan to return.

A 6-foot-1 outside hitter, Sather was rated the No.51 recruit in the nation by Student Sports Magazine as a senior at Maria Carrillo High.

She signed with UC Santa Barbara, a nationally ranked power, but success didn’t follow.

She played for one year under UCSB coach Kathy Gregory, a lengendary figure not known for patience or nurturing. A longtime star on the beach volleyball circuit, Gregory famously dumped 17 of her partners — after playing one match with them.

“Playing in Santa Barbara — that’s a pretty severe environment — and that didn’t suit Kristy very well,” SSU coach Bear Grassl said.

Besides the coaching style, Sather wasn’t prepared for the commitment required at the DivisionI level. Not just the practices, games and travel. It was everything from mandatory study halls to autograph sessions.

Sather left the team after her freshman season and transferred to the University of Arizona after her sophomore year.

“It was too much physically and my body couldn’t hang in there,” Sather said. “And mentally I wasn’t prepared for the amount of time required. I left Santa Barbara saying I would never touch a volleyball again.”

At Arizona, Sather threw herself into the education program. Her mother, Amy, the assistant principal at Rincon Valley Middle School, was an elementary school teacher for 12 years. At an early age, Kristy had a desire to follow in her footsteps.

“We’d ask her what she wanted to be when she grew up and she always said she was going to be a kindergarten teacher,” Amy Sather said. “She started saying it when she was 6. It’s pretty much been her dream.”

Sather is the oldest of three volleyball-playing sisters — Kaitlin, 21, is an outside hitter at UCLA and Ally, 17, is a senior at Maria Carrillo who has signed to play at SSU. If Kristy led her sisters into the sport, she was also a leader in other areas of her life.

The president of her middle school, Sather helped coach the volleyball team at Douglas Whited Elementary when she was 16. At 19, she was the director of Camp Wa-Tam, a popular summer camp at Howarth Park, and oversaw a staff of about 15 counselors.

As a senior at Arizona, she did her student teaching in Tucson and was accepted into the master’s program at Sonoma State. She was excited about her future, but she also had a desire to reconnect with her past: She wanted to play volleyball again.

She had athletic eligibility remaining. And she had a good relationship with Grassl, who coached her club team for two years when she was in high school. Would her old coach be interested?

Said Grassl: “I really didn’t have to say much besides ‘What uniform number do you want?’”

Because of her three-year layoff, Sather battled hip problems last year, but the rust came off rather easily.

After collecting the seventh-highest kill total in SSU history, she was named the CCAA Newcomer of the Year while earning first team all-conference honors and a spot on the all-academic team.

This season, SSU, which has had three straight losing seasons, had a school-record 14-1 start and tied a school mark with 10 consecutive wins.

Sather has been instrumental in the turnaround, despite bouncing between the classroom and the court. She misses practice on Mondays because of class and occasionally misses practice on Tuesdays to participate in the North Coast Beginning Teacher Program in Windsor.

When she does practice, Sather, battling a chronically sore shoulder, never takes a full swing. She conserves her strength for game nights.

Given her age — and aches — Grassl jokingly warns Sather about breaking her hip.

But the elder stateswoman on the court is a rookie at her 9-to-5 job.

Her inexperience, coupled with her schedule, might have scared off some employers. But Spring Creek principal Randy Coleman, who has known Sather since she was in elementary school, wasn’t alarmed. Coleman said Sather has seamlessly guided her students while juggling her other responsibilities.

“It’s always good when you don’t have parents coming in saying ‘Oh, my God, my kid has this first-year teacher,’” Coleman said. “I haven’t heard any of that. It helps that she’s 6-foot-1 and has this way about her that people just listen when she talks. She has a lot of self-confidence.”

Sather conveys a cool in an environment in which chaos constantlylurks. How often are 19 first-graders simultaneously obeying the class rules (1. Listen to the teacher and to your friends when they are talking)?

Like most elementary school teachers, Sather loves children. But she’s no pushover.

She bends down to students who tune out instruction, looks them in the eye and explains, “Now.” Her voice doesn’t rise. And it doesn’t need to.

Yes, Sather can handle discipline. But it’s the other aspects of her job that she cherishes.

“Teaching is her passion,” said Daniel Weber, her boyfriend of six years. “You don’t have to ask her — you can see it in her eyes when she’s teaching and you can hear it in her voice when she tells stories about the kids. She was made for this.”

Sather’s career in the classroom is clearly just beginning.

But her time on the volleyball court is dwindling.

She is counting the days to her final game with a mixture of sadness and relief — the end of volleyball will mean an end to her impossible schedule.

Of course, she’ll keep busy. And she won’t completely walk away from the sport she loves.

Ms. Sather will coach the Spring Creek volleyball team this spring.

You can reach Staff Writer Eric Branch at 521-5268 or eric.branch@pressdemocrat.com