State College alum enjoying return home for senior season

UNIVERSITY PARK — Taylor Leath remembers the good old days as a volleyball player growing up in State College.

She spent many hours playing in Rec Hall’s main and south gyms or in the Intramural Building. She would be there with some of her Lady Little Lion teammates, and even members of the State College boys’ team. At the time, a campus ID wasn’t necessary to walk into those buildings, and the nets were almost always set up and waiting for them to play.

Every once in a while, Russ Rose would be there and impart a little wisdom. Leath figures she has known Rose since fifth or sixth grade, knowing him more as a family friend than as the nation’s most successful women’s volleyball coach.

This fall, the perspective has changed. Leath is a Nittany Lion for one season, a graduate transfer from North Carolina, and Rose is the boss as much as a helpful mentor.

“As much as things are new,” she said, “it’s also incredibly comfortable in terms of knowing Russ since I was younger — on top of him knowing my family, knowing our values and how we operate. It’s coming into a really familiar environment, yet it’s not familiar at all. It’s a completely different program, a completely different culture. I grew up around it and I knew it, and I knew Russ, and it makes it even more seamless.”

Leath hit a career milestone Sept. 15 by notching her 1,000th kill, helping the No. 4 Nittany Lions win three matches at American University’s tournament. The Lions (9-1) started their Big Ten schedule at No. 7 Minnesota on Sept. 19.

Leath is the third State College product to play for Rose in the last 15 seasons, following Kelsey Ream (2007-09) and Maggie Harding (2011-13). Both were members of national championship teams.

Leath is the first student-athlete to join the Nittany Lions using the NCAA’s graduate transfer rules in Rose’s 40 seasons guiding the program. A knee injury sidelined her freshman season, so she had one season of eligibility remaining this fall. She finished with her degree in communications at North Carolina in the spring, and is attending the Donald P. Bellisario College of Communications to work on her master’s degree. She is focusing on public relations, and hopes to go into business with her sister, Randi, who played at DePaul and is working on her law degree there.

The sisters were regulars for organized get-togethers, camps and pickup matches on campus growing up. It was a second home for the standout athletes.

“A lot of times when I was in middle school, even in high school, we would be in here all the time,” Taylor Leath said. “Just over the summers, if we didn’t have anything with school, we would come here.”

She had a stellar career with the Lady Little Lions, topped by earning the Gatorade Player of the Year for volleyball in Pennsylvania. She is the only Centre County athlete — in any sport — to earn the state player of the year honor in the award’s history, dating back more than three decades.

After recovering from her first-year injury, Leath was a leader for North Carolina, including earning AVCA Second-team All-American honors and Atlantic Coast Conference Player of the Year honors as a redshirt sophomore. She was the team captain last season, and led the Tar Heels in kills both years, helping them to the NCAA Sweet 16 in 2016, falling to UCLA.

She said she’s still a Tar Heel, but she also needed to go somewhere new and out of her comfort zone, some place to change her perspective. While she may know all the side streets of State College and her way around the corridors of Rec Hall, Penn State still provided quite the change.

Joining the team also provides an extra dose of experience and wisdom, with newcomers, including eight freshmen, making up more than half the Nittany Lions’ 16-woman roster.

“She’s just a confident young person who doesn’t get too high, doesn’t get too low when things go bad,” said Rose, whose 1,255 wins and seven NCAA titles are Division I records. “That’s a level of maturity that you would expect her to have, having played a number of years in a good program.”

That maturity has led her teammates to call her “Grandma” – not so much because of her age, but for her wisdom and quiet, thoughtful demeanor.

“She knows how to bring the team together, tell them to calm down,” redshirt senior middle hitter Nia Reed said. “It’s, as Coach says, from here up (pointing to her head), from the neck up. Just keeping a steady head. She just does what she needs to do.”

Reed and Leath have known each other since they were about 14, when they first met at a volleyball camp at Juniata, which Penn State also hosts. They also spent time together at USA Volleyball training sessions. Reed helped convince Leath to return home when she was deciding what to do with her final season.

It has paid off for Penn State. Leath leads the team with her 80 kills, is second with 67 digs and third with 24 blocks.

Making that kind of an impact, even as a newcomer, helps when you feel right at home.

“She has led the team in many ways,” Reed said. “Without her, I don’t know what the team would look like.”