Uncommon Strength And A Solid Purpose Define Senior Julye

By Rich Myhre

By Washington Huskies

November 20^th, 2018

As a four-year member of the University of Washington volleyball team, Destiny Julye has experienced all the highs and lows of college sports. In that respect, she is pretty much like every other NCAA athlete.

But what sets Julye apart, said UW coach Keegan Cook, is her ability to endure the bad times with a minimum of discouragement and woe. Pity parties, it seems, are not her thing.

“Our athletes tend to have good days and bad days, and they have moments when they can lose it a little bit emotionally,” Cook explained. “But Destiny’s bad days are pretty mild. They’re actually hard to notice, which is rare. The life of a student-athlete has a lot of ups and downs, but she just keeps going straight ahead.

“Her ability to stay on track, I’ve never seen anything like it,” he went on. “Even from the beginning of our recruiting process, Destiny has always been an incredibly mature young woman. She’s been a role model of consistency. From a work-ethic standpoint, from a responsibility standpoint, and from the standpoint of taking care of all the other aspects of being a student-athlete, it’s always been amazing to me just how consistent she is.”

Uncommon Strength And A Solid Purpose Define Senior Julye

No doubt, Julye already had some of those traits when, as an incoming freshman, she arrived at Washington in the summer of 2015. But being part of a UW program with high expectations and rigorous daily demands has taught her “to be diligent and persist in all things,” she said. “On and off the court, I think I’ve learned to work hard day in and day out.”

Whether things are going well or not—and particularly when they are not—“I’ve learned to put my head down and keep working to try to attain my goals. Regardless of what’s happening, I always strive to get better.”

Julye grew up in Tehachapi, Calif., a city of some 12,000 residents about 40 miles southeast of Bakersfield along Highway 58. She also played basketball and ran track as a younger girl, but volleyball was always her first love. With a relentless desire to improve, she spent hours practicing outside the family home, smacking overhand serves against the sloped roof and then waiting for the ball to bounce back to her.

“Volleyball was a sport that kind of came naturally to me,” Julye said. “I remember always wanting to finish my homework early so I could go outside and (practice).” At team workouts, she added, “I wanted to be the first person in the gym and the last person to leave.”

A 5-foot-11 outside hitter in her senior year at Tehachapi High School, she was an obvious target for college recruiters.

At the time, Cook was an assistant to then-UW head coach Jim McLaughlin. The Huskies, with just one available roster spot for a freshman that year, were focusing on Julye and one other prospect. Cook recalls having a 10-minute phone conversation with Julye, and when it was finished “I walked into Jim’s office and said, ‘This is the kid you want.’ Just her poise and how articulate she was, all that came through. And (the decision between the two prospects) was over at that point.”

If the Washington coaches were persuaded that day, Julye made up her mind during an unofficial recruiting visit to Seattle with her father. It helped that they showed up in the summer—“The days I was here it was actually sunny and 75 (degrees), so I was a little deceived,” she said with a laugh—but what really won her over was the volleyball program, the university and the city itself.

Washington, she said, “was the first school where I realized, ‘This is a place I could really see myself thriving.’ I love the people here and it’s obviously beautiful in Seattle. The caliber of volleyball is very high, and the reputations of athletics and academics are great. So it was a pretty easy decision. My dad and I both kind of looked at each other, and we knew that this would be a good place for me to be.”

Throughout her UW years, the Huskies have remained one of the premier programs in the Pac-12 Conference, and also a perennial contender in the NCAA Tournament. In her three previous seasons, the Huskies claimed one Pac-12 title outright, were co-champions another season, and have also been the league runner-up. Twice they have reached the NCAA Tournament’s Elite Eight. In her four-year career (and with games still to play in 2018), Washington has a combined 58-20 conference record and a 105-26 overall mark.

Looking back, Julye said, certain moments stand out. Among them, a late-season match against UCLA her sophomore year, which began with the two teams tied for first place in the Pac-12 standings. Before a large, noisy home crowd, Washington prevailed to clinch a share of the league title. The Huskies then won the championship outright a week later by beating Washington State in Pullman.

Yet there have also been frustrations and disappointments. Foremost of these, Julye’s playing time has been irregular and sometimes infrequent. A year ago she was primarily a serving specialist, an important but also sporadic role.

“My club coach (in California) played college volleyball in Colorado, and I always remembered her saying that it was four of the toughest yet most amazing years of her life,” Julye said. “From having those conversations, I knew it was going to be hard sometimes. You don’t know the entirety of it until you’re actually here and working from sunup to sundown with school and volleyball.

“My career hasn’t been all that I’d hoped for in being an outside hitter and really being consistent in my game. So that’s been challenging. But in the end, I’ve seen the development in myself as a teammate and as an individual.”

But as Cook pointed out, “even when her performance isn’t where she wants it to be, her demeanor and body language and how she interacts with her teammates doesn’t waver. You always know she’s giving you the best of what she has. It may not always go her way, but she’s consistent in that regard. She’s always done what the team needs.”

And what the team sometimes needs is a player who can step in and fill a specific role. In recent years, that player has often been Julye.

“She’s an athlete who can play multiple positions,” Cook explained. “She’s played pretty much every position at some point in her career, except for setter. She’s hit on the left, hit in the middle, hit on the right, she’s been a serving specialist and she’s been a defensive specialist. She’s had her role change a half-dozen times, and yet she always responds with her best effort, which is also rare and impressive.”

As a server, Cook went on, “she’s one of the best in the Pac-12, and she has been for a couple of years. … We’ve had a number of matches where we’ve been down four or five points late, and Destiny walks up to the service line and we’re all like, ‘OK, we’ve got a shot to chase these guys down.’ Her serve and her steadiness have allowed us to make a comeback. Not that she’s out there getting aces, but she’s just putting consistent pressure match after match and giving us a chance to make something special happen.”

Along the same lines, Cook gives Julye high marks for dependability. Since she arrived at Washington, he said, “I don’t think she’s missed a practice for anything—injury, school or any unexpected things—and that’s pretty rare. A student-athlete’s career is so challenging, and usually something gets you along the way. But she has not had a missed step of any kind.”

Put it all together, Cook said, and in terms of “character, emotional (balance) and consistency, she’s the beacon of that. She’s just a wonderful young woman.”

Julye, the lone senior on this year’s UW team, has found inner strength from a Christian faith that is, she said, “very important to me.” As a younger girl she attended church with her family, “but it wasn’t really until my senior year of high school where I actually gave my life to Jesus. And that was really exciting to me. To have my faith not just be something that my family does, but to have it be something that I actually really enjoy and that is valuable to me.”

The growth of that faith “has helped me find what my purpose is in volleyball, what my purpose is in the classroom and what my purpose is in doing other different things,” said Julye, who attends a community church near Seattle’s Green Lake. “I’ve been able to go to Indonesia (on a mission trip), and I know that being a believer and sharing the gospel with people is the most important thing in my life. And that’s just been solidified more and more since I’ve been in college.”

As she reflects back on her UW years, Julye is grateful for the many great moments. Certainly those she has experienced in volleyball, but also academically and in the broader community.

“I’ve loved playing volleyball here,” she said. “It’s been amazing. I feel like I’ve grown so much as a person, as a student valuing education, and having the chance to learn about different things in our world that I’m passionate about and that I now want to go and try to change. I feel like Washington has been a place where I’ve grown a lot. I’ve grown as person, I’ve grown spiritually in my relationship with Jesus, and I’ve grown in my relationships with people.”

But she has also blossomed in the classroom because, she said, “I’ve learned the value of loving learning. Growing up, I was never really into school that much. I just did things because assignments were due and because later I wanted to go to college. But I was never that deeply excited about one single subject.”

Her perspective changed in her sophomore year at Washington when, she said, “I had these amazing professors and African-American political theory courses. I think that’s why I started to get excited about education and political science. For the first time in my life I was excited to stay up until 12:00 or 1:00 (a.m.) doing research that really wasn’t expected of me, but I was doing it because I really wanted to learn. My professors were encouraging me that if there’s something you’re really passionate about, just run with it. You may not have all the answers right now, but they’ll start to unravel as you continue to pursue the things that you’re excited about. And that (approach) has been really meaningful for me.”

Julye expects to complete her UW athletic career in the spring with the beach volleyball team. She will graduate with a degree in political science and a minor in education, and she then plans to embark on a two-year commitment with Teach For America, working in Oklahoma City with elementary-age children and particularly those kids who are in danger of lagging.

“You see the disparity (of educational opportunities and progress) when they are younger, and (what happens) when they get two and three levels behind in reading and in math,” she said. “So I want to start at the root. I want to be working where the root of the issue is, and that is education in elementary school.”

Her Washington years “have gone by so fast, and this year has gone by the fastest,” Julye said. “But I’ve enjoyed every moment of it with my teammates and with my coaches. And I wouldn’t change anything for the world.”