The sets kept coming, so Owen Chun kept swinging.
The Concordia-Irvine senior said he had no idea the kind of match he was having on a Friday night last month against No. 9 Grand Canyon.
The 2017 Hanalani alumnus said the coaching staff purposely keeps players from looking at statistics during matches.
All he knew was the ball kept coming, over and over and over again.
“My setter tries to find the hot hitter,” Chun said in a phone interview Monday. “In the moment I had no idea. All of my teammates were firing on all cylinders. The energy was great and the crowd was fun.”
In just three sets, Chun had taken more swings than he had in his first six matches combined. He put down 24 kills on 41 attempts and hit .537 in a sweep of the Lopes, which is easily the best match of the season for the Eagles.
“It’s taken him a little bit of time to get where he is right now,” first-year Concordia-Irvine coach Riley Salmon said Monday. “He went off against Grand Canyon and he’s been playing at a high level for a good, solid three weeks.”
The Grand Canyon match wasn’t a fluke. The very next night, he put down a career-high 28 kills in 65 swings in a four-set loss.
It takes some longer than others. For Chun, getting a chance to play consistently in the starting lineup has been a long journey made even more stunning considering the path he’s taken.
In high school, Chun was a soccer player, but as he continued to grow well above 6 feet, it was time to start thinking about college.
Volleyball was just a sport he played for fun. He didn’t even bother playing club until his senior year of high school.
Concordia-Irvine was in the middle of a three-year process to jump from the NAIA to NCAA Division II status and debuted as a Mountain Pacific Sports Federation member in 2018.
The roster size increased during that time, and despite limited time playing volleyball, Chun was given an opportunity to compete.
“Honestly, I was having so much fun (playing volleyball) that I really just wanted to keep playing, so I figured why not go for it?” Chun said. “I almost got cut my freshman year because I wasn’t up to par yet. I’ve always been confident I would get better and I really wanted it and was having too much fun at the time.”
After four years of volleyball, including the pandemic-shortened 2020 season, Chun thought his career might be over.
He was a semester behind completing his undergraduate courses, so he knew he would be in school in the fall. Would he continue on to the spring to play one more year?
“Honestly, it was up in the air,” Chun said. “I ended up being ineligible briefly because of some random class details, so I didn’t know. But Coach convinced me to keep going and I can’t be more grateful to have made that decision.”
Salmon, who played on the U.S. Olympic team, was hired as head coach in the summer of 2021.
When he first saw Chun play, he immediately moved him to opposite from middle blocker, and from there has seen Chun grow quickly into a starting-caliber player.
“One of the greatest things about Owen is he is unbelievably physically talented. He touches close to 12 feet, so he was going to be good in any sport he was going to play because it’s extremely rare to come across someone like that.” Salmon said. “He wasn’t getting a ton of touches in the fall. I knew he wasn’t eligible because he was one credit short. But it’s one of those things where the guy in front off him was playing poorly, so I told Owen, ‘Here’s your shot, make it count.’“
He’s done that, and just in time for senior night on Friday, when his family will be in attendance to see his final home match against UC Santa Barbara.
Then the MPSF tournament begins next week.
“I haven’t quite been able to process it all yet,” Chun said of his last few weeks. “It’s been a journey, man. I mean, volleyball has helped me grow as a person. I’ve been through a lot, and being able to play at this level and see what it’s done to my character has been really cool.”
OWEN CHUN
>> School: Concordia-Irvine
>> Class: Senior
>> Height: 6 feet 4
>> Position: Opposite/Middle blocker
>> High school: Hanalani (2017)
CAREER STATISTICS
Year MP-MS K A E Pct. BS BA BPS SA
2018 9-1 13 7 37 .162 0 2 0.14 0
2019 8-5 17 14 51 .059 0 2 0.13 2
2020 15-9 58 17 120 .342 1 17 0.45 3
2021 13-5 29 15 83 .169 2 18 0.59 3
2022 24-12 190 75 461 .249 9 27 0.53 9
TOT. 69-32 307 128 752 .238 12 66 0.46 17
