HERMOSA BEACH, Calif. — It’s monsooning in Thailand. This isn’t all that unusual. Southern Thailand amasses, on average, 94 inches of rain per year. Not that Sophie Bukovec would, or should, know this. She’s 16 years old, playing in the first — and potentially last — FIVB of her career.
The rain in fact reaches such a volume that, in the middle of her first round qualifier match, against Norway’s Vilde Solvoll and Cindy Treland, the organizers have to move the match to a different court.
“The courts were flooded,” Bukovec recalled on SANDCAST. “It was wild. I couldn’t see [Victoria Altomare, her partner]. That’s how much it was raining.”
They lose, 21-19, 14-21, 10-15. And then they lose again, in the most heartbreaking of fashions, as the organizer, awarding a pair of lucky losers, pulls two teams out of a hat that do not read the names of Bukovec and Altomare. And so there 16-year-old Sophie Bukovec sits, crestfallen and defeated, sopping wet on the southern tip of Thailand, wondering what anyone in that moment might wonder: “Is this what it’s like? Because I don’t know if I can do this. This is wild.’
“So,” she says, 10 years later, “fly to Thailand, lose, and see if you want to do it.”
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It is not monsooning in Rubavu, Rwanda. But it isn’t exactly pleasant, either. The heat is intense. Bugs otherworldly. The trip to the site for the 2021 two-star FIVB event is expectedly difficult, with a long, bumpy bus ride, and a hotel room that occasionally included an unwelcome but frequent guest: bats.
This is where the second act of Sophie Bukovec’s career must begin.
She hasn’t played an FIVB in more than a year. Her last, a three-star at home in Edmonton, Canada, with Taylor Pischke, concluded with a 17th. Pischke retired shortly after, leaving Bukovec, a 6-foot tweener, idling between undersized blocker and relatively untrained defender, without a partner and without a large pool of players from which to find a new one.
“When I was losing in qualifiers, when I was not doing well, not having a partner, playing with a bunch of people, having to fly to Rwanda because nobody else would play with me, in those moments and having those losses, I thought ‘Am I letting down the federation?’” Bukovec said. “They thought I was going to do X, Y, and Z so are you a disappointment if you don’t?”
To label Bukovec a…
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