Duprey Embracing Life as Wahoo

By Jeff White (jwhite@virginia.edu)
VirginiaSports.com

CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va. — When she entered the transfer portal after her junior volleyball season at Virginia Tech, Elayna Duprey was sure of two things: She wanted to stay in the ACC, and she wanted to remain close to home.

The University of Virginia checked both boxes. Never mind that Duprey, who’s from Alexandria, had spent two-and-a-half years at UVA’s chief rival.

“When I went to the portal, I had a clean slate,” Duprey recalled. “I was like, ‘Where I go is where I go.’ I hold no malice towards my old coach. I wasn’t like, ‘I’m gonna go to Virginia to screw her over.’ I was just like, ‘If Virginia offers me, that’s one of my schools, I’m gonna take it.’ ”

It helped that Duprey had two friends on UVA team: Milan Gomillion and Heyli Velasquez. Both spoke highly of the Cavaliers’ head coach, Shannon Wells, Duprey said, “and hearing about her from them, that cemented my wanting to go here even more.”

If Duprey had a concern, it was that some UVA players might be wary of adding a Hokie. She need not have worried.

“I never saw awkwardness,” said Duprey, who enrolled at Virginia in January. “Overall, the girls on the team have been very open and very nice and very inviting. I felt right at home here when I first walked on campus.”

UVA and Tech usually meet twice each season in volleyball, and Wells said she wasn’t sure how Duprey would feel about facing her former teammates, “just the emotions around that. But as far as our players, I think that we have a very welcoming group, and E came in right away and was very engaging and built really great relationships. So I just never felt like, because she came from Virginia Tech, that our kids were going to have this bias against her.

“I think they all knew that she was a great player. E was always the top person on our scouting report, and so I think they were excited to add someone like her and potentially not have to face her anymore.”

As soon as she learned that she’d been accepted at UVA, Duprey said, “I called my mom and I was like, ‘I’m a Cavalier! I’m a Cavalier!’ And I said, ‘I need to start buying like UVA stuff. I can’t show up [in Charlottesville] and not have anything.’ I was immediately trying to hit the ground running.”

Duprey, who led the Hokies in kills last season, with 222, has had an eventful summer. She competed last month in the European Global Challenge, a tournament held in Pula, Croatia, and helped Bring It Promotions’ U23 SE team, which was made up of college players, win the gold medal.

An America studies major at Virginia, Duprey aspires to play professionally after she graduates next year, and she enhanced her prospects with her performance in Croatia, Wells said.

“She had a really great tournament and got some recognition, and there’s a lot of foreign teams that come to those tournaments to watch,” Wells said. “I know in speaking with the [BIP] people, they basically said that E really opened some eyes to some opportunities for her in the future. And so that’s exciting. So I think that she’s excited about that and knows that the work that she’s put in over the last six months is really taking her game to the next level.”

Duprey, 21, played in the European Global Challenge last summer, too, and was named to the all-tournament team. That experience “really confirmed my wanting to commit to playing pro,” she recalled. “I was like, ‘I love this competition and I really want to continue playing.’ ”

In her first spring with the Wahoos, the 6-foot Duprey split time at outside hitter and right side.

“She’s got these aspirations of being an outside in professional volleyball,” Wells said, “so spring is a time that we work really hard to try to make sure that we’re not only training our athletes to help us in the long run but also [to support] their future goals. We can experiment a little bit. All of our pins train as outsides and right sides and they pass as well. And so this spring I think she was most successful on the right side, but she did some really nice stuff for us on the outside as well. So I think we’re all going into this the fall thinking the same thing. We have a really deep group of pins, and we’ve just got to figure out what each of their strengths are. For an outside you’ve got to have the ability to pass and that’s going to be the separator for that whole group, but there’s no doubt that you can score points with [Duprey’s] arm and she’s going to find herself on the floor.”

Duprey, who graduated from Flint Hill School in Oakton, isn’t the first member of her family to excel as an athlete. Her father, Michael, played football at Iowa, and her mother, the former Kathy Wilson, starred in basketball at North Carolina.

Given her mom’s background in hoops, how did Duprey end up focusing on volleyball?

“I started off playing basketball at first,” Duprey said. “Two of my friends that I’d met playing basketball were playing volleyball, so I wanted to try it.”

She played club volleyball and basketball as a freshman in high school, both in the same season, but her grades ended up slipping. “So my mom was like, ‘Listen, we’ve already made the commitment to volleyball. We have paid all this money for your volleyball. You’re going to have to give up basketball,’ ” Duprey said. “And I have not gone back to the sport since.”

En route to the European Global Challenge last month, Duprey and her teammates visited Austria, Slovakia and Slovenia before arriving in Croatia. Duprey left UVA three days before the end of the second session of summer school, and she brought some schoolwork with her on the trip.

In Slovenia, Duprey took (and passed) the final exam for her Gender, Sport and Film summer course.

“Shannon was worried about me taking my final overseas, but we created a plan,” Duprey said. Working with Mackenzie Nunes, the volleyball team’s academic adviser, “we got it figured out,” Duprey said, “so I was very grateful to Coach Shannon for letting me go.”

 

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Duprey is also grateful that she was able to enroll at UVA in January. That gave her the entire spring semester to familiarize herself with her new teammates and with the Cavaliers’ system.

“It was just so much easier to be able to go slow and break stuff down and actually have the time to learn their system,” Duprey said. “I can take each day one step at a time and not have to worry about, ‘OK, I’ve just learned this today and now I have to implement it on Friday.’ ”

Virginia opens the season, its fourth under Wells, on Aug. 30 in Norfolk against Marist at a tournament hosted by Old Dominion. UVA’s two matches with Virginia Tech fall on the same week: Nov. 6 in Charlottesville and Nov. 8 in Blacksburg.

The Hoos have swept their series with the Hokies in each of the past two seasons. Duprey played only once against Virginia last year, in the first-ever volleyball match at John Paul Jones Arena. The Cavaliers dropped the first two sets that afternoon before storming back to win the next three in a highly charged atmosphere.

The crowd of 3,162 was the largest ever for a Virginia home match, and “just seeing the support from the community did play a little bit of a factor in my decision [to transfer to UVA] as well,” Duprey said.

Now on the other side of a longstanding rivalry, she’s eager to help the Cavaliers ascend in the ACC, which has three new members this fall: Stanford, Cal and SMU.

“I absolutely cannot wait to see what we do in season,” Duprey said. “Obviously, I don’t want it to go by too fast, because it is my last year, but at the same time I’m just excited, because I think our first-years have so much potential and I cannot wait to see how they grow. I just think overall this team has so much potential, and I think it’ll be a really good team.”

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