Jordyn Poulter has seen the view from volleyball’s mountaintop.
The ascent is anything but easy, even for someone who succeeded at every waypoint.
In 2014, she was a blue chip setter out of Eaglecrest High School.
Her decorated collegiate career included multiple All-American honors and a Final Four appearance with the University of Illinois.
By the time she graduated, she not only secured a job in the top Italian professional league but also captured the attention of the U.S. national team and head coach Karch Kiraly.
By age 22, she earned the keys to the women’s team supercar.
Two summers later, she set Team USA to its first Olympic gold medal in Tokyo.
A quick summit, to be sure, but also the result of around-the-clock, around-the-calendar training and playing. A decade’s worth of it. The kind of grueling play schedule that makes such a rise possible and also sets up the biggest challenge of Poulter’s career.
Now just weeks before the 2024 Summer Games in Paris, Poulter is back on the climb.
A devastating knee injury 18 months ago set a new kind of course. An even tougher challenge. A race to get back to form in order to help the U.S. defend its gold medal.
An arduous task that went remarkably smoothly until recent weeks.
“There was never a question in my mind or a doubt that I’d come back,” Poulter told The Denver Post recently. “But there’s always an unknown about what version of yourself you’ll come back as. And I still think that I’m on my way back to reaching my best level.
“… I feel grateful that for whatever reason that I have that inner kind of security (that I’d be back) because it made the process decently easy. Maybe thatap because as soon as it happened I knew that, oh, this is going to be pretty long. I knew right away, ‘Oh, no, this is pretty bad.’”
A ‘pretty gnarly’ injury
Poulter leapt up like she has thousands of times before.
A tight pass meant she’d have to joust the opposing middle blocker. Not ideal, but nothing out of the ordinary for her and her Italian team, who were playing a road match in December 2022.
Mid-air, Poulter thought the opposing middle had kicked her in the knee.
When she landed, her world changed.
Poulter’s left knee was shredded. She tore her ACL, MCL and PCL. Her meniscus tore too, came detached, flipped over and ended up in the side of her knee.
“It was pretty gnarly for a routine play,” Poulter said. “For a lot of people, (an injury) is like a one-leg land or off-balance thing.
“Mine, if you watch it on video, it does not look like anything too traumatic. But it was for me.”
Poulter’s been told since then that overuse can cause an ACL to tear at the very top of extension on a jump. She didn’t feel an opponent kick her. She likely felt her ACL pop.
“Then the rest of my knee couldn’t figure out its place in space and everything else gave on the landing,” she said.
Even sitting on the floor, Poulter knew it was bad.
But her team was on the road. It had a 7-hour overnight bus ride back to Novara. Then a pre-dawn wait until the imaging center at a local hospital opened, got her in and showed the extent of the damage.
The wheels kicked into motion. Travel, surgery, rehab. Logistics abound. But almost immediately, too, Poulter thought about the calendar and about Paris.
“From the beginning, it was, ‘OK, this is going to be at minimum a year away from the court,’” she said. “Just with the multi-ligament damage, I knew I wasn’t going to be able to even start to play and get back to volleyball for a full 12 months.”
She had time, but not an unlimited amount.
“It was certainly bad luck that it happened then, but if it had to happen, much better that it happened in that time period than 12 months later,” Kiraly told The Post. “Because thatap given her a ton of time to work her tail off and do a lot of long, difficult, lonely work in rehab.”
Rehab and rebuild
The Poulter family living room in Aurora had holiday spirit around Christmas 2022, but hospital vibes, too.
Equipment was scattered about. The whir of machinery persisted. Ice machines worked overtime.
Poulter’s younger sister, Lorrin, tore her ACL a few weeks before Jordyn’s injury.
When you’ve got high-level volleyball players in the family — Lorrin was first-team All-Summit league at the University of Denver before transferring to Purdue — this is the only way you get the whole crew to the dinner table.
“If you walked into our living room during the holidays, it sounded like a nursing home with the sounds of the machines and people just lounging around with their legs propped up,” Jordyn said with a laugh.
In mid-January 2023, Dr. Thomas Hackett reconstructed her knee in Vail.
Rehabilitation nowadays starts almost immediately for high-level athletes, but Poulter had to spend six weeks on crutches because of her meniscus, which Hackett “was able to fish out and put it back in its place and repair it.”
She spent those first weeks in Aurora, tended to by her parents and working with physical therapist Wes Riggs of Pro Active Physical Therapy.
“I’ve worked with him since I rolled my ankle in high school for the first time,” Poulter said. “He and his colleagues just did me a huge solid and worked with me daily.”
Eventually, she moved the grinding work to the U.S. national team’s facility in southern California. For the summer of 2023, she had teammates around. In the fall, they scattered across the globe to their professional teams.
“Then it was just me and the staff. And thatap when it was really like, ‘Holy (crap), this is next-level in terms of testing my mental fortitude,’” Poulter said. “Just on top of the loneliness, then itap like you’re trying to re-teach your body these athletic mechanics that itap naturally done your whole life and that you haven’t really had to think about.”
Poulter, though, made the most of it. Part of playing year-round between overseas and the national team in the summer is that players are always preparing for games. There’s no offseason. There’s no time to dial in on an area of improvement and focus on it for an uninterrupted period.
It didn’t arrive by choice for Poulter, but she set out to maximize it.
“She’s gotten herself into a great place,” Kiraly said. “This is the most powerful I’ve seen her and the most fit I’ve seen her. She’s hungry, obviously, and has taken advantage of the break from organized volleyball to get her body and her mind as good as they can be under these difficult circumstances.
“I think she’s put herself in a really good spot and we’re excited to see how it turns out.”
The quarterback
For much of the past year, Poulter surprised herself with how smooth the work went. Sure, it was difficult, but she made steady progress.
What she wasn’t prepared for, though, was the return of her U.S. teammates to the facility a couple of months ago.
“Volleyball is such a team sport regardless and my position especially,” she said. “I rely on the first person thatap touching the ball and the third person thatap touching the ball. I’m the middleman. My relationships with my teammates both on and off the court are really important to me. And having never not had that, it was really challenging for me. …
“Itap not that I felt like I took them for granted prior, but I didn’t realize how much joy I get from being around these women and trying to work through the good and the bad with the people next to me.”
Thatap Poulter and thatap life as a setter. You’re the point guard, the quarterback, the igniter and facilitator. A leader, regardless of how much experience the players around you have.
“She’s a genuine person,” Illinois coach Chris Tamas told The Post. “… So whenever a person is like that and a player is like that, they’re going to garner that much more respect from their teammates and those around them. It just helps make a team better.”
Poulter hadn’t yet finished her collegiate career when she spent most of the 2018 summer around the U.S. team in California. She made a quick impression on Kiraly, the coaching staff and many of the national team veterans.
“Itap not uncommon for people to kind of freeze around some of our veterans or be afraid to communicate or miss out on the opportunity to learn from some of our veterans,” Kiraly said. “But she immediately struck up a rapport with some of the veterans in our program like Jordan Larson, Kelsey Robinson-Cook, Foluke Akinradewo-Gunderson. She wasn’t shy even though she was the new kid on the block. She quickly found ways to have effective interactions and communication with them.
“It would be a little like going to NFL training camp when you still have college eligibility and you’re throwing to some of the best wide receivers in the world and you’re comfortable having conversations on how to do that. That doesn’t always happen.”
In the fall of 2019, Poulter was playing her first full stint with the national team when Kiraly decided it was time to put her in the starting lineup.
“She handled that really well,” Kiraly said. The 2020 Summer Games got pushed back by a year, but when that came around, Poulter helped the Americans to their first gold medal in women’s indoor volleyball and staked her claim as a foundational piece of the group going forward.
“She hasn’t really looked back, except, of course, for the injury that slowed her down,” Kiraly said.
Paris looming
This may ultimately end up a fully triumphant story.
Poulter returns and helps lead the U.S. through another Olympic gauntlet and to another medal.
That is not a guarantee, however.
The setter started playing six-on-six about three months ago and could feel herself getting back toward full strength.
“I feel like every match and every practice I’m still re-learning my teammates and still recharging my IQ of the game and certain decisions that I would choose to make being the setter and being in charge of the offense,” she said. “Itap part of my job to pick apart the defense on the other side and maximize my players’ capabilities and put them in spots where they can be successful.”
She did that in the first weeks of the Volleyball Nations League tournament, including playing five sets against Turkey on June 2.
She made the 12-woman Olympic team June 5. Two days later, she sustained a bone bruise on the fibular head of her rebuilt left knee.She traveled with the team to Japan but didn’t play in VNL matches there June 11-12, then returned to the U.S. early for treatment.
“Right now itap been a lot of just managing that because with bone bruises all that heals them, really, is time,” she said July 5. “So I’m reintegrating back into the fold of practice, but yeah, itap not ideal. The timing could always be better but it could always be worse. Itap difficult to just not be in the thick of it with the team day-to-day, which I haven’t been in a full capacity.
“But I think the worst is behind me hopefully and itap been exciting to get better with the team.”
Kiraly, too, is hopeful Poulter will be ready to roll when the U.S. opens Olympic play July 29 against China and July 31 against Serbia, but couldn’t say so with certainty.
As of July 1, first-time Olympian Lauren Carlini and alternate Micah Hancock are handling the on-court reps when the team plays six-on-six.
Naturally, the end of July simultaneously feels like a long time off and right around the corner for Poulter, who initially wondered if the bone bruise would impact her status on the team.
“Initially it was more the mental unknowns of what it might look like or might not look like. It happened a couple of days after the roster was announced,” she said. “Now itap just tougher physically to see what that fine line is where we can push it and I can push myself to a full playing capacity while also not re-injuring it.”
If she and the staff continue to navigate that line successfully, she could well be in the lineup when the U.S. begins Olympic play. Poulter said she’s committed to maximizing any role she has on the team, but, “What we try to do as athletes is perform our best on the biggest stage in the world when things aren’t always necessarily feeling good.”
“There’s certainly a reasonable chance that Jordyn Poulter, as she was in Tokyo, is part of our starting group,” Kiraly added. “Even though itap not critical that she’s one or the other. One setter will be a starter and the other will be a game-changer. That could even change as the tournament unfolds. But Jordyn Poulter, at this point today, (July 1), is not able to do everything that people who are fully returned can do. … So is it optimum? No. Itap not optimum for Jordyn not to be able to do that yet, nor for her teammates.”
Nothing about the past 18 months has been, really.
But Poulter’s found a way so far. It has been a marathon. Now comes the sprint.
“I feel really empowered by having gone through it and knowing that I can do really hard things,” she said. “At some other point in life there’s going to be something that comes up and I think having this experience to pull from is going to be really powerful for me.”
