Ayanna Kimbrough: UCR Volleyball Scholarship

Many students dream of getting a scholarship to a college, especially when it is off of a sport that they love. To my knowledge, no one at TPAA has been offered this kind of opportunity to a college through a sport, until this year.

My fellow senior, Ayanna Kimbrough was offered a volleyball scholarship to the University of California, Riverside. This university is known for their girls volleyball team, in fact, they’re a division one school. This means that they are participants in the highest level of collegiate volleyball that there is. This allows them to compete against other big name schools and possibly compete for the NCAA Championship.

When Ayanna received this exciting news from the school, she could not believe it. She mentioned how at first she thought it was a joke.

“I was kinda shocked because I’ve been playing for a long time and I didn't really think I was gonna get to play in college because you hear people getting recruited when they’re like 14 and people getting recruited their sophomore year. So I felt I was a little behind if I wanted to play Division 1.”

This year holds a lot for Ayanna, she will start her practices in August and she will be playing as a potential starting opposite hitter. In addition to her athletic achievements, she will also be majoring in electrical engineering

Now that she is an official Highlander, she can not wait for her fall semester to start. She has even set big short term and long term goals that will be beneficial to her future.

“My goal really is to just have fun playing the game that I love and preparing for the job that I can’t wait to do in the future. If we can win a couple tournaments and conference titles while I’m there that would be dope. But academically UCR has a cool engineering college and it’s still growing so I can't wait to go to the different labs. I want to use their nano-tech lab so bad.”