Silvi Uattara was not the player that Leonid Yelin and the rest of the Syracuse coaching staff were looking for.

A heavy recruiter out of Russia, and Moscow in particular, Yelin had his sights set on different girls in the same position, who ultimately passed up American colleges to play professionally.

That left Uattara, a relatively inexperienced player who had only taken up the sport a few years prior.

“Her skill always was not bad,” Yelin said.

Four years later, Uattara’s skills have led her to 1,307 career kills so far — seventh best all-time for SU. She came into this season ranked second in Orange history with a career average of 3.62 kills per set. And though she wasn’t the player Syracuse originally wanted, she’s been one of the best it’s ever had.

Uattara took two chances on volleyball — moving to Moscow when she was 14 to seriously pursue the sport and coming to Syracuse when she was 18 — and they both have paid off.

“You just want to connect your life with volleyball,” Uattara said. “It’s a different thing and I didn’t really have … this option or this option. When I had the opportunity to come here, I was really happy about it.”

Uattara didn’t originally want to play volleyball, but her 5-foot-8 frame as a 13-year-old was enticing to any volleyball coaches she saw in passing.

Standing outside of English her class one day, a local coach asked the teenage Uattara to start playing. She said no. She didn’t even know the rules.

About a week later, she was approached again when another coach saw her shopping for a winter jacket with her mother.

“I thought that maybe it meant something,” Uattara said.

Thirteen was late to start playing compared to most girls in Russia who started at the age of 7 or 8, Uattara said. But after just a year of playing, she and her family moved six hours away from her hometown of Voronezh, Russia to Moscow so she could attend Sports School 65, Yelin said.

The school was meant specifically for volleyball players. The students had class, but also practiced four and a half hours each day with one session in the morning and another at night.

Though Uattara originally resisted the sport, volleyball became her passion, boiled down to one simple phrase: “I just love to hit the ball.”

“When someone is setting me the ball, I have a feeling that the team really needs me, Uattara said. “… Whenever you get the point, you get this excitement and awesome feeling.”

Getting on the plane in Russia, Uattara thought to herself, “Oh my god, I’m actually flying to the United States right now. It’s going to take me nine hours and I will be in a completely different world.”

When she stepped off in Syracuse, her knees were shaking.

“Everything I was waiting for for so long is about to start right now,” Uattara said of the moment. “How should I do? What should I do?”

What she did was have an effect on the Orange right away. In her freshman season, Uattara led the Orange in kills and had more than 100 more than anyone else on the team. She’s led the team in kills every year since then, too, and this season has the most with 132 through 11 matches.

Volleyball coaches’ interest in Uattara spawned from her height, but since then she’s grown to just 6 feet tall. Her successes, instead, comes from her ability to jump and strength in her arms, which she says is mostly natural.

Power is part of her game and represented by a lion tattoo on her left thigh.

Uattara ranges usually on the left side of the net, swinging wide out of bounds and launching off her left foot at the far edge of the net for the kill.

She hammers spikes into opposing players — often sending balls flying off of opponents attempting to dig and into the Women’s Building’s makeshift locker rooms.

A kill is almost always followed by a full-arm, hooking-fist pump celebration and a yell as the sound of the ball hitting her opponent still echoes through the arena.

Playing with emotion is an essential part of her game, though it has caused Yelin to sit her on the bench to calm down.

“I try to stay focused, but I cant play without emotions because those are what lead me,” Uattara said

She leads the team in pregame chants, yelling “S who?” to a response of “SU” from her teammates in a circle around her. At the end of each match, Uattara breaks her teammates down, too.

And though Uattara wasn’t the team’s first choice four years ago, she is now.

“It’s my person to go to,” setter Gosia Wlaszczuk said. “… If we do it 24-24, you can go ahead and go to the left side because that’s where the ball will go.”

Published on September 22, 2015 at 9:30 pm

Contact Jon: jrmettus@syr.edu | @jmettus