Junior Carmen Annevelink verbally committed to University of California-Berkeley for volleyball on Friday, November 1.

Carmen feels confident that she’s found a volleyball program with the Cal Bears that offers her the best opportunity to grow as a student and an athlete.

“The combination of great athletics and academics was the most important factor,” Carmen said.

Still, she remains confident that, despite her being an athlete in college, she will continue to place an emphasis on her academics. This is why she chose Cal: because she found the college to be the perfect mix between great academics and excellent sports.

“When I decided to play volleyball in college, I knew being a student always had to come first, ‘student-athlete.’,” Carmen said. “To commit to really good schools like Cal you have to take initiative and really show yourself off, so that what I have been doing since the beginning of this past summer.”

She viewed her familiarity with the coaches and the Cal program as a whole as a reason for selecting the school.

“I also really like the coaches at Cal, the three of them are a great team and they really support the girls,” Carmen said. “Even at the summer camp this past summer they were super nice and supportive of me pursuing a spot at Cal. The team at Cal is also great and I am friends with two commits for next years team as well. I am actually playing with one of them, Christine Alftin, for club this year on Vision’s 18 Gold team.”

Carmen cares less about the D1 title of the volleyball program at Cal and instead views the mix of athletics and academics that Cal offers to be more important to her. However, she does appreciate the added challenge of performing at a high-level for a D1 volleyball program.

“It was important that I found a place that has great academics as well as a great volleyball program,” Carmen said. “It didn’t matter too much if it was D1 or D2 or D3 but obviously playing D1 will be a greater challenge, but at the end of the day I do like challenges.”

Carmen had a variety of other considerations aside from Cal as well.

“I did consider other schools both in California and elsewhere.” Carmen said. “For example, UCSD, UCD, Cal Poly, UCLA, USC, Dartmouth, Cornell, MIT and Harvard. Cal stood out to me because I did want to stay in California if it would work out because I love California.”

Carmen will be joining her brother, Emil Annevelink, ‘12, at the university, which was another of the main factors that swayed her toward Cal.

“I will be joining my brother at Cal,” Carmen said. “I was able to see a lot the campus and feel like more of an insider already because he was already a student.”