Swiss player climbs the women’s volleyball record list

In 2012, Kim Spring decided to travel all the way from Switzerland to Hawaii to play the rightside/outside hitter for Chaminade University’s volleyball team. Since then she has had one of the best careers in Silverswords history.

Spring, now a senior, has started all 93 matches except one and is currently ranked sixth on the Chaminade women’s volleyball career list for most kills with 970. With 12 matches left in the regular season, she could surpass her coach Kahala Kabalis Hoke to become the fourth all-time in kills in CUH history.

“I don’t really worry too much about that I guess,” she said recently. “I’m just playing and doing what I can and not doing it for the stats.”

Chaminade (9-8 overall, 3-5 Pac West Conference) will start a six-match homestand with a matchup against Concordia at 3 p.m. on Sunday in McCabe Gym.

Spring has been playing volleyball for most of her life, and before coming to Chaminade, she played on both the junior indoor national team and the beach junior national team for Switzerland. There she contributed to three championships, one in beach volleyball and two for indoor volleyball.

When deciding upon where to go to college, Spring had never heard about Chaminade University before. She was introduced to Chaminade by Sandrinha Brunke, a German women who travels around the world to help young volleyball players earn scholarships to compete in the U.S. Brunke, who used to play volleyball for HPU, reached out to Spring about playing overseas and helped her create a video.

“Sandra showed Kahala my video and she contacted me, and I didn’t know anything about Chaminade but I figured Hawaii sounded nice,” Spring said.

Since then, Spring has become a valued player for the volleyball team. Outside hitter on the team, Emma Tecklenburg, enjoys playing with Spring and describes her as a strong leader.

“It is so much fun,” said Tecklenburg about her teammate. “She is a great leader on and off the court, and the energy kind of follows her. So when she is doing really, really well, everyone is doing really, really well. She is a strong leader so she makes it easier for everyone.”

When Spring was about to start her junior year in 2014, she had some academic trouble. She realized that the degree she was pursuing in forensics would not be valid back in Switzerland. She then decided to leave Chaminade and enroll at a university back home instead.

“I decided to leave and go back home and try that out, and eventually it was very different,” she said. “It was a huge university. You only had science, like you didn’t have the general ed classes like here. You only had very plain science classes, and I didn’t really like it that much. So I was gonna change my whole life plan, and I didn’t really know what I wanted to do. Then coach emailed me again asking if I wanted to come back. So I did wanna come back, so I figured out a different plan for me which included me being here and graduating from Chaminade.”

Since returning to Chaminade in 2015, Spring has continued to impress on the volleyball court while juggling schoolwork as a english major and playing tennis for CUH at the same time.

“It’s my senior year, fourth season, and I’ve had it all,” Spring said of her busy schedule. “Where it was easy to juggle, I had no problem. I was juggling school, practice and social life, but this semester is pretty hard cause we have a lot of roadtrips, and if you are on a roadtrip, you are just gone for a week straight and you miss all classes and sometimes you miss homework because you don’t know about them.”

After a year without Spring on the team, Hoke is glad to have Spring back on the team again.

“We’re very happy to have Kim back, she’s a great player and one of our most dynamic attackers,” the coach wrote in an email about Spring’s return to the Chaminade women’s volleyball team.

When confronted about possible plans after college, Spring does not know for certain what she is going to do.

“It’s pretty out and open cause I don’t even know if I’m gonna stay in Hawaii or go home,” she said, “so it all depends on where life takes me.”