Brooke Van Sickle and the Little Things That Keep Us Alive
Petro Gazz’s outside hitter Brooke Van Sickle talks about volleyball the way some people talk about childhood summers: with a shrug, a smile, and the faint suggestion that the whole thing was inevitable.
“I would say it was one of those things that I started at a very young age. I just fell in love with volleyball quickly,” she says. Her parents played, so she played, and fate did the rest. “It kind of just happened. Thanks dad.”
ALSO READ:
Of course, nothing “just happens.” Not in sports. Not in life. Not when your body is both the tool and the ticking clock.
“It’s normal as athletes, we definitely go through periods,” she says—periods meaning the downturns, the ugly days, the underside of the highlight reel. “People don’t realize it but it happens. The lowest times was when I was battling with injuries. No one wants to get hurt.”
There’s a gravity to the way she says that. A kind of kindness too, like she’s explaining something she’s already forgiven the world for. Even your own talent will turn on you sometimes. Even the thing you love.
“Even when I’m healthy, no one wants to be playing bad,” she adds. And that’s the whole trick of it, the bad days that arrive without warning. The doubt that grows teeth.
So how do you outlive it?
“Every athlete goes through it, you just have to have the mental grit to be able to pull yourself out of your downlow, just be able to flip the switch.”
She makes it sound like turning on a light. But most lights have a cord that leads back to something: hers is gratitude. “Just being grateful for the little things, just like the sun’s out.”
A small thing. A human thing.
Homesickness, for example, is supposed to haunt imports like a shadow.
“As an athlete, we want to play that sport that we love for a while,” she says. “You don’t know when your career could end at any moment.” So she lives with her feet planted where she is, not where she came from. And right now, she’s lucky. “My parents are here so I’m not homesick because I consider them my home.”
You start to see the pattern: her strength isn’t the vertical jump or the kill count. It’s the constellation of people orbiting her.
“I would say my support group,” she says. Teammates. Management. Parents who send emoji updates like they’re broadcasts. Friends here, friends there. All of them a kind of scaffolding.
And then there’s the pair of necklaces she never takes off.
“Me and my mom actually have matching ones,” she says. “These are actually little hearts.” Another piece for dad with a pendant from grandma. A small museum she wears every day. “I never take them off unless there’s a dire need that I have to.”
This is what athletes don’t tell us: that greatness is made of tiny things. Gratitude, a heart-shaped pendant, a message from home. A day when the sun is out. Little reminders that the world is still soft somewhere.
Brooke knows this. She wears it. She lives by it.
And maybe that’s why she survives all the parts of volleyball that try to break you—the injuries, the doubt, the distance. She’s mastered the oldest trick in the book:
Hold on to something small.
Let it pull you back.
For more exclusive volleyball stories, click here.
