Baby Alters Plans For Volleyball Star

PULLMAN - Days before he knew her favorite food or her taste in music, Tymon Berger discovered something about Sarah Silvernail.

"The Olympics, that's what we talked about the first night," Berger said.

Specifically, the 2000 Sydney Games and how Silvernail was planning on kicking some international butt for the USA women's volleyball team.

About four months later, Silvernail was selected to play on the U.S. national team.

But a chance meeting in a college-town bar would be the turning point that changed the direction of her life, the tone of her dream.

Silvernail is no longer training for the 2000 Olympics.

Instead, she has been pregnant, lived through the death of a sister, became the wife of Tymon Berger and became a mother.

"The only thing Tymon knows about me is that I'm just a housewife and that I don't ever work out," said Silvernail, while bouncing her eight-month-old daughter, Kahle, on her knee.

A housewife, whose ability once made her the most-feared player in the Pacific-10 Conference. Her conference record of 6.12 kills per game as a senior still stands, as do her Washington State records of 1,848 career kills and 649 single-season kills.

Berger never saw Silvernail hammer the ball to the floor.

"We met in a bar in Moscow," Silvernail said, who will turn 24 this month. "I asked him if he was a U of I football player.

"He said `No, WSU crew.'

"I said, `Oh, I thought you did a real sport.' " Silvernail always was good at digs.

Berger kept the rally going.

"She told me she was the manager of the volleyball team," said Berger, who also turns 24 this year. "And about an hour and a half later, I put together Sarah and Silvernail. It's a real catchy name and I knew I heard Sarah Silvernail somewhere."

Somewhere, for one, is on the very short list of Washington State players who have been selected as first-team All-Americans. The women's roll call begins and ends with Silvernail. She was named first-team All-American her senior season in 1996, one year after being selected second-team.

The first step after college was the national team. Silvernail moved to the training center in Colorado Springs, Colo., the team's new home and part of the program's restructuring, after the Americans' failure to medal in the 1996 Atlanta Games.

Because of its poor showing, the American team failed to cash in on the women's sports bonanza, a largesse reaped by the Olympic women's ice hockey, basketball, soccer and softball teams. The volleyball team lost sponsorship.

Silvernail was there to build the new foundation on a team filled with college players with no international playing experience. She was switched from middle blocker to left-side hitter, because, "In international ball, everything goes outside. Middles are there to block. Outsides are there to hit," Silvernail explained.

She didn't disappoint herself, her teammates or the newly appointed USA Coach Mick Haley.

"I'd be surprised if she's not going to be one of the top players in the world in three to four years," Haley said at the time.

She was ready for the next level, but she also wanted to take her relationship with Berger to the next level.

They remained together through visits and phone calls.

Silvernail traveled the world in 1997 - China, Japan and Taiwan - getting her first taste of international competition. Berger remained in Pullman studying for degrees in business and construction engineering.

Being apart was the most painful part of their daily lives.

"I remember sitting in the Olive Garden in Spokane having lunch and having this discussion." said Berger. "We were both looking for something more meaningful. It would have been too hard on us for me to be in college and her on the national team and still consider ourselves as dedicated people to each other.

"In a sense it almost had to be as extreme (as having a baby), because we needed a real good reason to change our lives as dramatically as we did."

She first felt something was different when the national team was in Puerto Rico in September 1997.

"I was doing my 400 sit-ups a night and there was a layer of fat there I knew was not supposed to be there," she recalled.

Abortion was never an option. The pregnancy wasn't as unplanned as it appeared to others.

"We weren't using birth control," Silvernail said. "We were planning on being married, so we were going that way anyway. We weren't really preventing having a child. We had talked about it before it even happened.

"My entire life, things happen the way they're gonna happen."

Perhaps, but she may never understand the death of her 25-year-old sister, Christine.

"Five days after I got home (in Yakima), my sister was killed in a car accident," she said.

It was a single-car accident that happened on a curvy road outside Tacoma before dawn on Oct. 5, 1997.

"She went off a 20-foot embankment and an autopsy report showed she was alive 17 hours. No one found her until Monday morning," Silvernail said.

The Silvernail sisters became close after early years of sibling rivalry.

Christine was three years older than Sarah, and a star basketball player at Santa Clara University. She was named West Coast Conference basketball player of the year in 1993-94. Sarah was voted Pac-10 Conference volleyball player of the year her senior season, another first for a Washington State female athlete.

Christine was one of Sarah's biggest supporters and attended many matches.