Forest Hills Eastern has a plethora of up-and-coming teams, including the vastly underrated women’s volleyball squad. This group comprises a bundle of high-energy players, headed by team captain Layna Waselewsky. Waselewsky, mainly a libero, plays at an incredibly high level. A level that has been recognized by an abundance of accolades, such as her selections to the All-Conference, All-District, and All-Region teams over her last three years of high school Volleyball. Waselewsky currently holds a verbal commitment to Eastern Michigan University to continue her volleyball career, an opportunity only a minute fraction of athletes have the chance to do.
Waselewsky’s career started at a young age, playing for a club called Aim High. In asking Waselewsky why she started the sport, she replied “I loved the competitive side of volleyball and loved being able to score points for my team.” Most kids are usually coerced into playing their sport, whether that be by friends, family, or coaches, but Waselewsky was an outlier and played volleyball for the love of the game. Her skills were built from the ground up; offseasons were filled with vigorous weight training and arduous practices that stretched to four hours long. Waselewsky was never bothered by the time commitment, relying on her love of the game to carry her through. Although offseasons are enormous parts of an athlete’s journey, she attributes her success mostly to her lack of excuses or, moreover, inability to give them. From a young age, her coaches expected her to be at practice hours early, leave late, and show up to “optional practices” as if they were the opposite. Even through all this dedication, she was still benched and told that she “was not good enough.” She persevered the only way she knew how — by spending hours upon hours in different gyms, training to get an edge over girls who were older and better than her. She wasn’t allowed to be anything but great. As she’s grown older, her training has branched even further. Currently, she attends afterschool Power Strength sessions and practices at a facility called Far Out, where she puts an ungodly amount of hours into volleyball.
Waselewsy made it a point in the interview to talk about the mental side of athletics. She went in depth surrounding her struggles with mental blocks during her play and how it can cause her gameplay to tumble and avalanche into a mess. When asked how she works through these blocks, she responded, “I do a routine to calm myself and set my mind back to the situation at hand,”. This level-headedness allows her to be a great leader, as feelings and emotions don’t take precedence over facts and reality. She takes initiative when the team is in a slump, she brings her teammates up, and she teaches them how to be better players. This all comes with the humility that she’s not perfect. She understands that she makes mistakes, that she makes the wrong plays, and that she doesn’t always need to be in the driver’s seat.
When asked about her Forest Hills Eastern squad in the upcoming season, Waselewsky insisted that she didn’t expect a grandiose winning streak, but she did expect “…full effort 100% of the time.” She stood firm that her team wouldn’t lose to luck or bad beats, but they would only lose to a team that completely and utterly outplayed them. That down-to-earth leadership is a hard commodity to come by in sports and is almost non-existent at the high school level. Waselewsky intends to be a part of a state champion squad one way or another but currently has her sights on winning the District title first. Her dream is to pave the way for future generations of Forest Hills Eastern Volleyball.
