<p>Living in a volleyball-centric household was never more valuable to M.J. Hammill than it was this spring.</p><p>With the sports world shut down due to the COVID-19 pandemic, there hasn’t been a club volleyball season to speak of. Teams weren’t even able to get together to practice until just recently. So having a mother and older sister at home who both played Division I college volleyball was a welcome benefit for Hammill, a Center Grove graduate who is preparing to make the leap to that next level this fall at Wisconsin.</p><p>The Hammills have a net set up in their back yard, so M.J. — the Daily Journal’s Player of the Year as a junior in 2018 before missing about a month of her senior season thanks to an emergency appendectomy — was able to work through drills and play doubles matches with older sister Taylor and their mother, Julie.</p><p>"There was no lack of competition in my own back yard," M.J. Hammill said.</p>[sc:text-divider text-divider-title="Story continues below gallery" ]<p>Hammill’s Center Grove classmate, Ashley Eck, was nearly as fortunate. The Indiana State recruit and 2019 Daily Journal Player of the Year was able to do workouts with her younger sister at home, peppering volleyballs off of a wooden wall and practicing with their own backyard net — at least temporarily.</p><p>"We just used that for a while," Eck said, "and then my dog popped the ball, so then we just didn’t do anything."</p><p>The shutdown didn’t come at an ideal time for Hammill and Eck, who are both trying to make the transition to collegiate volleyball this season.</p><p>Eck, fellow former Trojan Jamie Brown and their new Sycamore teammates were supposed to have spent early June in Italy on a training trip — the perfect opportunity for freshmen to build relationships with the rest of the team before their rookie campaign starts. Instead, they’ve been reduced to getting acquainted through Zoom meetings.</p><p>The ISU players played virtual bingo during one call and did yoga together on another — but it’s hard for the newcomers to connect with people they’ve spent little, if any, time with in person, if at all.</p><p>"It’s kind of awkward because we don’t really know each other that well," Eck said. "Everybody else is fine, but it’s the freshmen that feel uncomfortable."</p><p>Hammill doesn’t have that problem; she’s been in Madison, Wisconsin for more than a week already getting her bearings.</p><p>For someone who verbally committed to the Badgers during the fall of her freshman year of high school, it’s been a dream come true — even if the circumstances are a little bit different than she had imagined all this time.</p><p>"I have been looking forward to this day and being here, actually being in Madison in this incredible environment, for so long, so it was really crazy when I finally realized that this is the time that I actually get to be here," Hammill said. "This isn’t necessarily how I pictured all of it happening, but even beyond that, being here’s just the best thing, and it’s everything that I had imagined when I committed and even more."</p><p>Hammill has been lying low thus far with preseason workouts not having ramped up yet; she’s taking one summer course and staying in her "little bubble" with her new roommates.</p><p>She’s not sure yet what volleyball will look like once she’s back on the court, but she feels as though she made good use of the shutdown time this spring and has been able to stay relatively sharp.</p><p>"I didn’t take it as an offseason by any means," Hammill said. "It made me work around a lot of things, but it also made me grow a lot in a mindset of, ‘I’m not going to let my environment change me.’"</p><p>Eck was actually able to get on the court for a couple of weeks’ worth of June practices with her Circle City club team, even getting some scrimmages in.</p><p>Considering how much time it had been since she’d taken part in actual six-on-six competition, she was more or less pleased with where her game is.</p><p>"Some aspects. Serve receive, I’m definitely still rusty on that, but that’s just a really hard skill with volleyball," Eck said. "But defense and other things like that, I think I’m fine; it’s just like riding a bike. It’s a few of them that I’m kind of struggling with, but it’s not as bad as I thought it was going to be."</p><p>As Hammill found out when she was sidelined for a good chunk of her senior season at Center Grove, absence indeed makes the heart grow fonder when it comes to volleyball. Not being able to be in the gym these last three-plus months will make her appreciate it that much more once she is.</p><p>"I just realized how much I really loved the sport," Hammill said.</p>
