Sophia Sabol, a sophomore volleyball player at Center Grove, recently won her division at the USA Powerlifting High School Nationals.
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Sophia Sabol wasn’t entirely sure how much weight was on the bar until she was standing in front of it and heard the PA announcer put it out there.
She just knew that it was exactly how much she needed to win. That was about the only information that Sabol needed.
“I’m a very competitive person, and I don’t like losing,” she said.
Sabol promptly deadlifted a lifetime-best 135 kilograms (298 pounds) on her final go-around — which, when added to her 132.5 kg (292 pounds) squat and 52.5 kg (116 pounds) bench press, was enough for her to win her division at the USA Powerlifting High School &Teen Nationals late last month in Lombard, Illinois.
Her total of 320 kg tied with Stella Tintari atop the women’s raw JV (freshmen and sophomores) 67.5 kg division; Sabol won on the tiebreaker of lower body weight.
“She did numbers she had no business doing,” said Jeremy Hartman, Sabol’s coach.
Competing for a national powerlifting title wasn’t really on Sabol’s radar when she began training with Hartman late last fall. The Center Grove sophomore was just looking to get herself in better shape for volleyball, so after the Trojans’ season ended in the regional semifinal, she started getting to work in the gym in an effort to get stronger and boost her vertical leap — a particularly valuable tool for a 5-foot-8 player looking to avoid being pigeonholed as a back-row specialist.
“I’m a shorter volleyball player, and my vertical has helped me get to that next level,” Sabol said. “I really want to be a good all-around player… (and) in the long run, it’s athletic ability and vertical and strength. When you’re up there, you’re up there.”
Sabol says she’s already noticed a difference in her explosiveness while playing for Circle City during her club volleyball season. But as she made bigger gains in the gym, she and Hartman also started discussing the possibility of lifting competitively.
Once she committed to trying to qualify for high school nationals, Sabol had all the motivation she needed.
“It’s just one of those things, like hey, we’re going to teach you a little bit at first, see how you do,” Hartman said. “She got around the girls here, started really seeing what it was like, then she started getting a little fired up.”
Making her debut at the Illinois state championships, Sabol squatted 120 kilograms (265 pounds), benched 50 kg (110 pounds) and deadlifted 115 kg (254 pounds) to comfortably qualify for nationals. Just over three weeks later, she was back in the Chicagoland area chasing a much bigger prize.
Sabol led Tintari by 7.5 kilograms after the squat — her third and final successful lift actually set a new Indiana record for her weight and age — but found herself behind by that same margin after the bench. Going into her final deadlift, Sabol wasn’t sure how heavy she had to go to pull out the victory, but Hartman did. He concedes that he wouldn’t have ordinarily pushed her 27.5 pounds past her previous high, but neither of them had come there to play for second place.
Hartman didn’t give Sabol the number; he just told her it was for the win.
“She’s a competitor; she feeds off of that,” Hartman said. “She needed to know what was on the line.”
After coming through in that gold-medal moment, Sabol has officially gotten the itch. Volleyball and beach volleyball are still her top priorities at the moment in terms of her athletic future, but powerlifting has now at least entered the discussion; she plans to compete for another title next year, this time against the juniors and seniors, and she’s opened herself up to the idea of lifting competitively in college.
The payoff from this first experience, after all, was well above and beyond any expectations.
“I really didn’t know going in,” Sabol said. “I would have been really okay placing top five, and then I realized mid-meet, ‘I have a chance to win.’ I started pulling numbers that I’ve never done before.”
“Even as a coach, you don’t know how a person’s going to be until they get out there and you really put them in the fire, see how they’re going to last,” Hartman added. “She went out there, and warmups looked good; she looked like a veteran out there. She didn’t look like a novice. She looked like she had been there before.”
Now, she seems pretty likely to be there again.
