GoHeels Exclusive: Reborn and Rejuvenated
August 30, 2019 | Volleyball, Featured Writers
GoHeels ExclusiveÂ
By Pat James, GoHeels.com
Coming off a 2017 campaign that saw the North Carolina volleyball team snap its record streak of seven straight NCAA Tournament appearances, Joe Sagula recalls going to dinner with a few returning veterans in the spring of 2018.
Sagula said he wanted to meet with them and hear what changes that they thought needed to be made. They also talked about the program's culture and how that could be maintained.
Some of the players in attendance had been team leaders before. Others, such as Mia Fradenburg, were expected to assume larger leadership roles in the fall. But after a few of those players elected to transfer in the weeks that followed, Fradenburg was one of the only veterans still left.
Then a rising junior, she had played in just 24 matches until that point. Still, Sagula felt comfortable asking her to step up and lead.
"We didn't have much else, but we knew she had the qualities we needed to be a leader," he said. "She's a good role model. She's the type of kid you want on your team. She's a good teammate, she cares about the people around her, she listens well, she is invested in learning, she's trying new things, she's a hustler, she gets after it, she comes to practice every day ready to go. Those are the qualities we want.
"We said, 'You've got to be one of our leaders.'"
She's since embraced being one.
'Where I wanted to be'
Around the age of 10, Fradenburg, from Durham, said many of her friends started playing volleyball. But she was initially hesitant to join them.
The idea of trying a new activity struck fear into her. So, too, did the possibility of her giving the sport a chance and proceeding to struggle at it. Those concerns were quelled, though, after she said her mother, Patricia, convinced her to attend a clinic at the local Triangle Volleyball Club.
"I think the first day after I made my dad go and buy me a volleyball," Fradenburg said. "We would just play outside nonstop."
From there, she went on to play club at Triangle all the way through 17s. During her first few years with the club, she said she always admired the older girls, the ones who were committed to colleges and showed up at the tail end of her practices wearing matching T-shirts and carrying matching bags. She wanted to be like them. And at Triangle, she knew she could be.
"It was set up for you to succeed and to find a college to play at," Fradenburg said. "When I made it to high school, that's when I seriously started considering this might actually be an option for me."
She never thought attending UNC would be.
A Duke fan growing up, Fradenburg said she was a junior at Cardinal Gibbons High School in Raleigh when she received an email from former Tar Heel assistant coach Eve Rackham, inviting her to visit campus. Fradenburg had some preconceived notions about Carolina. But her mother, who worked in Chapel Hill at the time, insisted she'd like it.
Although Fradenburg remained adamant that she wouldn't, Patricia finally got her daughter on campus. And it didn't take long for her opinion to change.
"I remember coming here and I was like, 'Oh my gosh, this is incredible. All those stories aren't true,'" Fradenburg said. "After that, I just knew this is where I wanted to be."
Shortly after, Fradenburg said she received another email from the coaching staff. This time, she was being asked if she would enroll early. Fradenburg hadn't considered that possibility until then, and she knew doing so would prevent her from playing her last club season. But the benefits outweighed the cost.
She joined the team a year later. And that decision paid dividends.
"It kind of lessened my nerves about the academic stuff in college, like, 'Oh, wait, I can do this,'" Fradenburg said."It automatically got me a whole semester extra of technical work, what the coaches want of me, getting comfortable with the team, which I really think helped going into my freshman year.
"When you think about it, because we're a fall sport, it was like a whole extra season of training that you usually wouldn't get. And then that made me more prepared for the next spring."
Learning from adversity
After appearing in 15 matches (26 sets) during Carolina's run to the 2016 ACC Championship, Fradenburg entered her sophomore spring looking to secure a starting role.
Armed with a year of experience, she said she started feeling more comfortable spending time with her coaches, talking and watching film with them. She also began applying the lessons she'd learned from UNC's 2016 seniors (Abigail Curry, Sheila Doyle, Tatiana Durr, Hayley McCorkle and Taylor Treacy). All that helped her win the libero job.
"She took a lot of good steps forward," Sagula said, "and looked like she was it."
Then, adversity hit.
In the Tar Heels' eighth game of the 2017 season, a ball struck Fradenburg in the head. There had been times, she said, when she'd been hit much harder. And she felt no different than then. But after taking another blow to the head during a practice a few days later, she started experiencing some symptoms of a concussion and was later diagnosed with one.
Until that point in her volleyball career, Fradenburg said she'd sustained a few minor injuries that had forced her to sit out or be limited during some practices. Her concussion cost her 19 matches in what might have been a breakout campaign.
"Working so hard through the spring and summer and making some sacrifices, it was frustrating when I couldn't put all those things together in season," she said. "I felt like I was finally starting to get out of the jitters of having a starting role when I got hurt, so it was definitely tough."
What made it even more difficult, she said, was seeing so many of her teammates also battle injuries.
Carolina was never fully healthy during a 14-14 season. Still, there was plenty of talent on the roster heading into the spring of 2018. Fradenburg and her classmates, which formed the nation's No. 3 recruiting class in 2016 according to PrepVolleyball.com, had talked about winning four ACC Championships together before enrolling. They could still claim three.
And then suddenly, some of them were gone. So was Rackham, who left to become the head coach at Tennessee and took assistants Tyler Adams and Gavin Watt with her.
It took a while, Fradenburg said, to process everything. Not only was she now without a few of her closest friends, some of whom moved across the country, but she was being asked to provide stability. With only nine or so players going through spring practice, though, she was able to gradually adapt to her expanded leadership role.
"It was almost like a good trial run to being a leader," she said. "It's like, 'Here's a smaller group of people. Let's try it out with this small group.' It kind of set me up and gave me opportunities to practice being a good leader, leading by example and being more of an organizer."
Any fears that she had about not being able to do those things dissipated when her teammates voted her, Katharine Esterley and Madison Laufenberg as team captains.
"That kind of put away any doubts I had about being a leader, knowing that my teammates trusted me to be that," Fradenburg said. "And then also having conversations with coaches, like, 'Hey, we need you to step up.' I wasn't like, 'Oh, no.' I was like, 'Oh wait, you actually believe that I can. You see that I'm able to do that.'"
'Reborn and rejuvenated'
For much of last season, Fradenburg said the Tar Heels were trying to establish an identity. That was easier said than done as she and Esterley were learning how to best approach their new roles while also trying to get a mostly new cast of characters on the same page.
UNC finished the year 8-19, marking its first losing record since 2009.
Sagula said both Esterley and Fradenburg "did the best they could in a dysfunctional year for us." But now, that's behind them. And he's excited to see how Fradenburg finishes her career.
"I feel like she's been, in a way, reborn and rejuvenated," said Sagula, whose team opens its 2019 season with the ACC/Big Ten Challenge on Friday and Saturday in Carmichael Arena. "I think she's ready to have a great senior year."
Both as a player and a leader.
At some point during her first two seasons, Fradenburg said Rackham told her she had good things to say; she just needed to say them more often. The senior still doesn't consider herself "an extremely vocal person." But she's more inclined to speak up.
"She's never going to be the No. 1 vocal leader," Sagula said. "But she now has a voice within this team that is louder. Volume just doesn't make you a leader, if you yell. But when she says stuff, people will listen and people will follow her."
They also pay close attention to her actions on the court.
"(She has a) very stable, very calming effect on people," Sagula said. "She lets people around her not panic too much because she doesn't. She doesn't look flustered. You're (never) like, 'Oh my gosh, where's her head?' You can tell when people wear their emotions. She doesn't. She's very much the same."
Whether she's shown them or not, Fradenburg, an environmental health major with a minor in Spanish for the professions, said she's felt some emotions with her career winding down. She can't help but think she's experiencing the last of something every day.
But she hopes that gives her an extra spark as she attempts to lead Carolina back to the NCAA Tournament for the first time since her freshman season.
"To say we're going from near the bottom of the ACC to the top, that's a big stretch," Fradenburg said. "But at the end of the day, I would really like to see people like me, Greer (Moseman) and Skylar (Wine), in our last year, just make it to the NCAA Tournament.Â
"Maybe that is through winning the ACC Championship or at least being top three in the ACC will hopefully guarantee a spot. … But that would just be a good way to end and know everything I went through was definitely worth it."
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