Net Result

Lola and Mila Prpa, 13-year-old twin sisters, didn’t set out to become elite volleyball players. Like many kids, they tried a lot of activities when they were younger. “Mila did every sport,” says their mom, Nicolette Daniel. “Lacrosse, soccer, ice skating, gymnastics, swimming.” For a while, Mila got seriously into competing in the equestrian sport of show jumping, but after three serious injuries, “I hated to do it, but we had to make the decision to take that away,” says Nicolette. Mila liked every activity she tried. Lola rode too and also did ice skating, taekwondo, ballet, and tap, but had yet to find an activity that really spoke to her. While Nicolette always wanted the girls to be involved with a sport and an art (“It didn’t matter to me which ones,” she says), she began to wonder if they would find a sport that Lola would like for the long term. “Volleyball was the one sport we hadn’t tried with them,” she jokes.

Then, the family moved from Wisconsin (they had lived in the town of Winnetka, where the house from the movie Home Alone is located) to Houston, which just so happens to be the second most competitive region for volleyball. (Dallas is first; Texas is a powerhouse for the sport.) The girls were nine.

They moved in the middle of volleyball season and were able to find one club, in The Woodlands, willing to put Lola on a team, although that team, the youngest they had, was for 11-year-olds and Lola was only nine. She played there for only a few months but was interested in trying out for club volleyball for the next season.

LIFE'S A BEACH Although indoor and beach volleyball both involve a net and a volleyball, they are two completely different sports. Most indoor players do not also play beach. Mila and Lola play both. Mila (left) and Lola (right) hold certificates showing that they qualified for three different national events for Beach Volleyball National Events (BVNE). Lola holds the third-place medal they, playing as a team for the first time, won, enabling them to go onto two national beach-volleyball championships held by BVNE. They also played in a third national beach-volleyball championship held by a different organization this season.

At age 10, Lola and Mila went to a sleepaway camp for the summer. “I got a letter from them, which was all ‘I love you’ and ‘This is so much fun,’ but on the flipside of it, they had written, ‘Mom, come get us now,’” Nicolette remembers.

Nicolette did, picking the girls up a day early, telling the camp the girls wanted to try out for volleyball back in Houston. After all, Lola had already been thinking about it. “I figured, I can’t make up a story about why I’m picking them both up early and then not follow through; that’s not a good thing to model as a parent,” says Nicolette, so Mila, “who had never touched a volleyball before,” also tried out, with Lola trying to surreptitiously coach her from the sidelines. Both girls made teams, though at different clubs.

Nicolette jokes it was “divine timing.” “Maybe Lola wouldn’t have tried out, maybe she would have been too tired after camp, maybe Mila wouldn’t have tried out,” she says.

These days, Lola and Mila live, breathe, and sleep volleyball. The rising eighth graders play on their school’s indoor-volleyball team at River Oaks Baptist School, and they also play on club teams for indoor volleyball. Last season, Lola played setter for Texas Legacy 13 Elite (the national and most competitive team the Texas Legacy Volleyball Club has for 13-year-olds) and Mila played in the positions of defensive specialist, middle blocker, and libero for the 13 Molten team at her club, TAV Houston. Both of the girls’ teams competed in USA Volleyball’s Junior Nationals tournament in Dallas in late June. Lola’s team came in third in the nation in its division, and Mila was chosen to be featured as a stand-out athlete during the tournament.

The girls just tried out for next season in club volleyball. Both will be playing for TAV Houston, but on different teams. Lola’s team will be Open Division, which is the highest level of competition.

The girls also play beach volleyball, which is a different sport, for Third Coast Juniors Travel Team. In beach volleyball, both Lola and Mila qualified for the Association of Volleyball Professionals’ Junior National Championships, which was held at the end of July in Hermosa Beach, Calif. and then went on to compete in two more national beach volleyball tournaments immediately after, both of those in Santa Monica.

Lola playing beach volleyball.

What this all means is that Lola and Mila play a lot of volleyball. They practice and play pretty much year-round. The season for their school volleyball runs from the end of August through November, they start playing for their club teams in November, then beach starts in January and they play both club and beach through July. They practice six to seven times a week.

And the girls wouldn’t have it any other way. “If I don’t play volleyball for three days, I feel like I have to play,” says Lola. “I want to be playing. I want to be on the court.”

They also go to clinics and private lessons and camps, such as the one held at Stanford University, a powerhouse in women’s volleyball. The entire family fell in love with the university’s campus and with the beautiful weather there.

“Lola wants to play setter for Stanford,” says Nicolette.

“Hey! I want to play for Stanford, too,” says Mila, though she also likes the idea of going to college on the east coast.

The girls' team from last year, HJV 12 Elite at ESPN in Orlando, Florida, after winning Third Place National Champions.

The girls often travel on the weekends to tournaments, and because the girls play on different teams, Nicolette ended up hiring someone to help get the girls to their practices and games.

“Sounds weird to say that we have a babysitter because we are 13,” says Lola, “but our practices can be on the same day.”

“And sometimes we can need to be at different qualifiers, like I need to be in Reno and she needs to be in Minneapolis on the same weekend,” says Mila.

The family sees a silver lining, a teachable moment, in this situation.

“I can’t be in both places, and not having your mom there is scary for any kid. Nobody would choose that, but –” says Nicolette.

Lola at the MLK Invitational Houston in January. Her team had just won a game, moving them onto the gold bracket. (Photo: Joe Buvid)

“Your support means so much to me,” Lola tells her mom, “but I have also had to teach myself, how if you’re not there, if there’s no one there to support me, I had to learn how to be my own support.”

The family enjoys the travel but likes the destinations for beach volleyball tournaments (beaches, after all, in Florida and California, for example) more than the ones for indoor volleyball.

“But the qualifier in Vegas [for indoor] was kind of fun,” adds Mila.

Nicolette likes the idea of volleyball for her girls because it is a sport where height is prized. At 13, both girls are already about five foot nine, and their dad is six feet six inches tall. “Volleyball is an environment where being tall is a beautiful thing,” says Nicolette.

In addition to being tall, the best volleyball players are also strong and fast and fit. “Everyone goes to the gym, and everyone has muscles,” says Lola. Mila agrees. “Even if a player doesn’t look very athletic, you know they are because of the way they move,” she says. 

Top volleyball players also need to have endurance. During a tournament, they often need to play seven or eight games, each of which lasts about an hour, in a single day. Nicolette calls this necessary endurance “a great separator” in the sport.

“Volleyball is such a mental game, too,” says Lola.

Mila playing at the same tournament, the first big indoor-volleyball tournament of the season. (Photo: Joe Buvid)

Attitude, Mila adds, is important. “Being energetic and uplifting to the team and having the best mental game will help everyone on the team. The best volleyball players have that,” she says.

The game is also fast, which requires a certain mental fortitude, the ability to put what just happened, good or bad, in the past and keep going. “The average time for a rally is nine seconds,” explains Lola. “That’s why you should never linger on the past or think about what you just did because the game is just so fast. A touch is not even a whole second, and then you’re moving again.”

Competitive volleyball aficionados often talk of “volleyball IQ.” It’s the ability to make good decisions and come up with good strategies during these lightning-fast games. Players practice individual moves until they become muscle memory. “The coach will ask them, ‘If the ball is going past your left shoulder, which foot do you start on?’ and they’ll know,” says Nicolette. It’s why, to get to the elite levels of the game, the athletes have to start young, no later than Mila and Lola did.

“That just happened to be when it caught fire for Lola and Mila,” says Nicolette. “That’s hard to explain to parents who want to jump in later. Volleyball is a sport that’s a build-on; we’ll see a player do something and I’ll say to a new parent, ‘That’s just experience, it’s time and touches.’” Some of the girls Lola and Mila play have, at age 13, eight years of playing experience already.

In indoor volleyball, where teams field six players at a time during a game, Lola plays setter, which is like playing quarterback in football. Lola runs the team’s offense. She “sets” the ball up, usually on the second “touch” of the ball. A team is allowed to touch the ball three times before they have to send the ball back over the net. Lola sets the ball so another player, one of the hitters, can “attack” it and send it back, hopefully, of course, in a way the other team can’t return. (When you score, it’s called a “kill,” and when you save a ball that is almost to the floor, that’s called a “dig.”)

Mila is a utility player, meaning she can play many different positions. Last season, she alternated between two positions on her club team. Ironically, these two positions are usually on opposite sides of the height spectrum. She played middle blocker, a position involved in both offense and defense, which is usually played by the tallest player on the team, and she played libero. Libero, from the Italian word for “free,” can be pronounced either “li-BEAR-o” or “LEE-beh-ro,” and is sometimes shortened to just “bro.” Liberos are the players wearing different colored jerseys than their teammates. Although Mila was the tallest member on her team, liberos tend to be the shortest players. They play defense and only from the back row and can be substituted in without it being counted against the team’s limited number of substitutions.

This coming season for club, Mila will play defensive specialist (DS) and outside hitter (OH).

The girls celebrating Easter with family. Pictured, from left: stepdad Patrick Daniel, little brother, Bond, age four, mom Nicolette Daniel, Mila, Lola, and Nana, Elizabeth Robertson Power.

At one point, as I was struggling to understand the game, Lola said to me sympathetically, “Don’t worry; volleyball does have a lot of rules.”

And beach volleyball is a whole different animal. Sure, there’s a net. And there’s a volleyball. And that’s about where the similarities between the two sports end.

Nicolette, a former dancer, says indoor volleyball is to beach as ballet is to hip hop. “Indoor is about the fundamentals,” she says. “Beach is a lot of strategy, they’re doing things that would make an indoor coach cringe, and they need to be a good all-around player.”

In beach, there are only two players, rather than indoor’s six. They play outside. “The weather is like the third player on the court,” says Nicolette, whether that’s the wind carrying the ball in a different direction (“The wind decides everything,” says Lola) or whether the players have to call for a time-out because of the heat. The court is sand, the players play barefoot, and they wear sunglasses, both as protection against the sun and also against the sand getting in their eyes as they jump and dive for the ball. Beach, like indoor, is played at the college level and is also an Olympic sport. 

Most indoor players do not also play beach, but Lola and Mila think they should. “It helps with indoor so much,” says Mila. “It helps you move super fast and jump higher.”

While the girls like both sports, Nicolette likes that in beach the kids themselves are more in charge. Lola explains, “We’re facilitating everything. We’re our own refs, our own coaches. It’s so free, you’re deciding everything.”

Adult spectators can’t coach the players in beach volleyball at all, and even risk disqualifying their team if they try. “It’s like golf,” says Nicolette. “You just clap and say, ‘Good job.’”

Lola and Mila have never seen a volleyball team, indoor or beach, get a red card, or even a yellow, because of a player’s behavior, but they have seen a parent earn a red card for their child’s team and get kicked out of the game. “He was using awful language and challenging a call,” says Nicolette. “Then, he kept arguing, even after getting a yellow card, and they had to pause the game for ten minutes.”

Nicolette says being the parent of elite athletes is a balancing act. She watches her daughters closely to make sure they still want to play. “Neither one of them has ever said, ‘I don’t want to do this anymore,’ ever,” she says. At the same time, though, she encourages them to “push through” on days when they might be feeling under the weather and go to the game or to training because, she says, “the reality is you have a place on the team.”

But she refuses to be that overinvolved parent. “All of these girls, they’re very smart girls. They know when they mess up. Their coaches might yell at them, their teammates might, and they’re yelling at themselves. The last thing they need are parents on the sidelines yelling at them,” says Nicolette. “My philosophy is, I’m just there to put in ponytails and get them there on time.” Also, she says, “I love to watch them play.”

While the girls are focused on volleyball right now and hope to play in college, they say their educations come first. Both are honors students. Mila, who likes math, would like to go into finance, and Lola, who just won an award in science, would like to be a neurologist.

These girls know how to keep their eyes on the ball.