Another great honor for a former Colony standout

In 2015, Eve Stephens stepped onto the volleyball court for the Colony Knights for the first time. Less than five years later, Stephens is one of the best Division II volleyball players in the nation.

Stephens, a UAA sophomore, was recognized by the American Volleyball Coaches Association for the second straight year, earning second-team All-American honors. That’s a pretty big deal for Stephens, who was an All-American honorable mention following her freshman season with the Seawolves. It’s also a tremendous story.

Stephens has been playing volleyball for only five seasons.

Stephens’ older siblings were also standouts at Colony High. Her brother Chaz won a state title with the Colony boys’ soccer team. Her sister Chase was a track and field star and an all-conference basketball player. Stephens played basketball in her younger years, but it wasn’t for her. She gave volleyball a try in middle school, and liked it. When she found a new home at Colony High, she also found a new home on the volleyball court.

And as it turned out, she was a natural.

“She’s incredible, the only player that I’ve ever had, you can literally talk about it, and she gets it,” Amy Carter, Stephens’ head coach at Colony, told me after Stephens signed her National Letter of Intent to play for UAA. “When we first started footwork on blocking, I’d show her one time, she’d go through it like two times in practice. Then she’d go home and the next day she’d be able to do it.”

It didn’t take long before Stephens made an impact. She found her way into the starting lineup as a sophomore, and that was just the start. As a junior and senior, she was named the Northern Lights Conference Player of the Year and led the Knights to back-to-back NLC titles.

Stephens has incredible athletic talent and a skill set that helped draw the interest of UAA volleyball, a really good program. But it’s the combination of athletic ability and intelligence that really makes her special.

“She thinks about it. She thinks about why. She wants to understand,” Carter said during the NLI ceremony.

The latest honor is part of a long list of accolades for the second-year college player. Stephens, a right-side hitter, was recently named a unanimous selection on the All-Great Northwest Athletics Conference first-team for the second time. She led the GNAC with 3.90 kills and 4.70 points per set.

Stephens is also a standout on and off the court. She was named CoSIDA Academic All-District 8 with her 4.0 grade point average. Stephens is majoring in accounting.

Stephens was named a 2017-18 Mat-Su Valley Frontiersman/Mat-Su Seahawkers Student-Athlete of the Year. Eve Stephens is the type of athlete I had in mind when I created our annual student-athlete of the year award, and it is great to see she continues to enjoy success.

Contact Mat-Su Valley Frontiersman managing editor Jeremiah Bartz at editor@frontiersman.com.