In her first spring with the Wahoos, the 6-foot Duprey split time at outside hitter and right side.
“She’s got these aspirations of being an outside in professional volleyball,” Wells said, “so spring is a time that we work really hard to try to make sure that we’re not only training our athletes to help us in the long run but also [to support] their future goals. We can experiment a little bit. All of our pins train as outsides and right sides and they pass as well. And so this spring I think she was most successful on the right side, but she did some really nice stuff for us on the outside as well. So I think we’re all going into this the fall thinking the same thing. We have a really deep group of pins, and we’ve just got to figure out what each of their strengths are. For an outside you’ve got to have the ability to pass and that’s going to be the separator for that whole group, but there’s no doubt that you can score points with [Duprey’s] arm and she’s going to find herself on the floor.”
Duprey, who graduated from Flint Hill School in Oakton, isn’t the first member of her family to excel as an athlete. Her father, Michael, played football at Purdue, and her mother, the former Kathy Wilson, starred in basketball at North Carolina.
Given her mom’s background in hoops, how did Duprey end up focusing on volleyball?
“I started off playing basketball at first,” Duprey said. “Two of my friends that I’d met playing basketball were playing volleyball, so I wanted to try it.”
She played club volleyball and basketball as a freshman in high school, both in the same season, but her grades ended up slipping. “So my mom was like, ‘Listen, we’ve already made the commitment to volleyball. We have paid all this money for your volleyball. You’re going to have to give up basketball,’ ” Duprey said. “And I have not gone back to the sport since.”
En route to the European Global Challenge last month, Duprey and her teammates visited Austria, Slovakia and Slovenia before arriving in Croatia. Duprey left UVA three days before the end of the second session of summer school, and she brought some schoolwork with her on the trip.
In Slovenia, Duprey took (and passed) the final exam for her Gender, Sport and Film summer course.
“Shannon was worried about me taking my final overseas, but we created a plan,” Duprey said. Working with Mackenzie Nunes, the volleyball team’s academic adviser, “we got it…