Sasha Fiallo Sasha Fiallo 5'8" | S/RS Brentwood School | 2030 CA wants a college coach to notice her volleyball IQ before anything else. She describes herself as always trying to stay ten steps ahead when she is running an offense, a skill she considers a real advantage at the setter position, where the amount of thinking required every single point is enormous. A footwork clinic reshaped her game more than she expected. Told that better footwork would make setting easier, she started focusing on squaring up and getting her feet to the ball rather than relying only on her hands, and the payoff was bigger than just cleaner sets, it made her more deceptive about who she was setting and sharpened her game across the board. Fiallo’s goal for her high school debut is to get to the point where she can jump set every ball regardless of the pass, and her college dream reaches high, she is aiming for a program like Stanford or an Ivy League school where elite academics and elite volleyball exist in the same place. She credits her family’s sacrifices as a major source of her motivation, saying their faith in her pushes her to put in extra reps and extra time in the gym. She wanted to be part of the Freshman Showcase to start becoming a recognizable name in her graduating class, and she was hoping it would bring exactly that, recognition and exposure in front of high-level coaches.

~ Michelle Bamford @Coachable247

Sash Fiallo has a specific memory that explains her growth better than any general description could. Early in her team’s first tournament together, playing against Prime, her hitters kept running into the block on the pin. She realized the fix wasn’t a different hitter or a different play, it was tempo, so she started putting more pace on her sets to the pins. Her team has been rolling ever since, and she traces that one in game adjustment directly to the improvement in her setting today.

Her setting and serving were already the parts of her game she trusted most heading into UA Next, and playing alongside a talented new group only sharpened that confidence further. What she took from competing at that level was an intensity mindset: every point deserves full effort, because in a gym full of players trying to make the same jump she is, it genuinely does. She’s carrying that mindset into her offseason training, where speed, accuracy, and volleyball IQ top her list, along with extra conditioning to keep up with the physical demands of running an offense at a higher level.

~ Michelle Bamford @Coachable247