When Camp Verde’s volleyball team takes the floor for the fall season, senior Paige Seneca will have a new role with the team. It’s a role that she embraces and looks forward to.
The Cowboys lost a total of five seniors from last year’s team. That makes Seneca, a four-year player in the program and Camp Verde’s starting setter, one of the more important players on this year’s team.
“I’m very excited to have that role as a senior — to have the younger girls look up to me,” Seneca said. “To kind of show them how the team is supposed to work and it shouldn’t be about one player. Not making it all about yourself.
And giving them the respect they should have and not using my senior attitude or taking things out on them but helping them and influencing them on the proper way to be.”
Seneca acknowledged that being a senior leader will require her to be better in certain areas, something that she’s made strides at doing.
“Building more compatibility with others. Learning to work with others throughout the season. Being able to talk more. Be more outgoing and have fun,” Seneca said of her personal goals for this season. “I recently got a job to improve my social ability. I was lacking in social ability. You could tell during sports that it was something I lacked. I’m trying to be more social and more talkative.”
Seneca will also be focusing on her academic future during her senior year.
Following her 2021 graduation, she plans on attending Yavapai College and getting her prerequisites out of the way. From there, she hopes to attend Texas A&M.
“It’s all about seeing new places for me, I guess,” Seneca said. “I want to move out of state and see new places but also be close to family. And it’s about an hour-and-a-half from family — and other places are too cold in the winter.”
While in school, Seneca is planning on working toward being an orthodontist, an interest she developed after getting braces of her own and being fascinated with how it all works.
“I thought about dentistry, but that’s a lot of blood,” she said. “I thought wires and brackets were a lot more interesting than digging into people’s teeth.”
In the more immediate future, Seneca hopes that the volleyball season will take place.
If it does, she hopes the team will continue to show improvement in regards to working together.
“We need a lot better teamwork,” she said. “I’m hoping we build a lot more strength and integrity throughout the season and have more success than the past couple of years. This year we did not get a lot of practice together because of COVID. We’ve been cut off every time we’ve started. I’m hoping there’s a season.”
Official season or not, Seneca said the girls have at least had a good time so far with coach Britney Armstrong.
“Playing with Britney and the girls allows you to have fun, make friends and have that team bond.”
