It truly was Christmas for Evana Ramos on Friday, when she made two trips to Starbucks.
Rarely does the Edinburg North early graduate, and self-admitted Starbucks addict, have that much time during a day.
“She’ll start training at like 5 a.m., get ready for school or her day, go to practice after school and then have another practice and training session and get home about 10 or 11 p.m.,” Edinburg North head volleyball coach Raul McCallum said. “Then she’ll do it all over the next day.”
Her dominance this year on the volleyball court, as a libero, was second to none and because of her outstanding year has been named The Monitor’s All-Area Volleyball Player of the Year.
“She was a coach’s dream,” McCallum said. “Every year she got better and she knew what she wanted and would tell the girls on the team, ‘If you want something, you have to work for it.’ You get a player like that once in a blue moon. We were blessed.”
Earlier this year, Ramos signed her national letter of intent to play for UTRGV. She has graduated from Edinburg North and is already working with the UTRGV volleyball team, while continuing to train with the RGV Venom volleyball program. Coaches throughout District 31-6A commented often during the past season about Ramos’ rigorous training routine and how difficult she was to contend with as a player, leading the team in digs, kills, serve-receive passing (an astounding 98.4% success rate, according to McCallum) and aces.
She’s the first to admit, however, that what changed the most about her this year was her attitude and the way she led the Cougars, communicating and working with her teammates to help make them better players and, thus, a stronger team.
“As a freshman, when I went into Venom, I had a terrible attitude on and off the court,” Ramos said. “(Venom directors of operations) Todd (Lowery, who is also the UTRGV head coach) and Missy (Lowery, his wife,) helped me so much with that. They made me realize that playing is not so much a job and taught me how to be happy with what I was doing. I think this year was a big example of being positive on the court.”
“I was very mean in the past and I wasn’t trying to be. I have learned to make it where I push people in a positive way instead of bringing people down. It made a huge difference for me and my team.”
A setter for some of her freshman year, before being moved to libero near the end of that season, Ramos put up staggering numbers. Her junior year she led the nation in the regular season with 1,153 digs according to MaxPreps.com. Last year, as a senior, she collected 445 digs during a season cut by more than half due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
“I told her as a sophomore that the libero spot was hers and that’s where she has been. Nobody could do what she did as a sophomore. This year, she took over as a leader and helped us by keeping the girls calm, teaching them how to read the play and what to look for,” McCallum said. “Those were things we hadn’t seen from her before.
“On the court she was our go-to player. She knew where the serve or the attack was coming and she would shift. Like a baseball player who can pick up the rotation and see the seams once a pitcher releases it, she would to the same — see it rotating, read what brand the ball was and just knew where it was going.”
Ramos was as deadly an attacker from the back row, often receiving the serve or first ball and preparing for a back-row attack on the third ball.
“She could’ve played all the way around because she was a great front-row player as well,” McCallum said. “But for one I didn’t want to take the chance of her getting injured and she was just so good at that back row.”
Ramos will start school at UTRGV when the next semester begins. Her major is mass communications/journalism. Her goal, however, is to prepare for the next level of volleyball after college.
“I want to eventually play overseas,” said Ramos, who had a peach black tea on her first trip Friday to Starbucks and then an almond milk iced coffee with almond milk foam. “But right now the girls at UTRGV are helping me with my transition and it’s very different how they push you to get better. There’s no letting up and that’s what I want to do, get better every day. And I’ll work for it.”