University of Georgia Athletics
Rothenberger's Pursuit & Persistence Rewarded
October 26, 2018 | Volleyball, The Frierson Files
By John Frierson
Staff Writer
Waiting by a phone that won't ring can be interminable, especially when you have no idea if the call will ever even come. Recruiting and dating can have a lot in common.
Claire Rothenberger wasn't going to just wait for the phone to ring. Several years before she was finally offered the chance to play volleyball at Georgia, Rothenberger, from 800 miles north in Aurora, Ill., had decided where she wanted to go to college.
If only getting there was so simple. The path of the defensive specialist's arrival at Georgia — where she's now a redshirt freshman — has no straight lines, only twists and turns.Â
"It's kind of a long one," Rothenberger recently said of the story of how she wound up at Georgia, which is actually where she wanted to be all along.
Rothenberger knew a little about Georgia because her father, John, went here, as did an uncle and two cousins — all of them graduating from the Terry College of Business, she said. But what really got her interested in Georgia was visiting the campus and Athens when she was a freshman in high school, when the family was taking a trip through SEC country so her older brother Brad could look at colleges.
"I just remember visiting Georgia and being like, 'Oh, I like this school, it's beautiful,'" she said.
And in a lot of ways, that was that. She knew where she wanted to go to school, especially once she read up on Georgia's College of Environment and Design.
"By my junior year in high school I was interested in landscape architecture and [Georgia] has a renowned program and that's what I was initially going for," Rothenberger said, so she reached out to the now-former coaching staff, she said, and that didn't really lead anywhere.
By her senior season Rothenberger knew she was good enough to play Division I volleyball, she'd had enough success at the high school and club levels to see that she could compete at that level. But her phone wasn't ringing off the hook, from Georgia or too many other schools. One situation appeared to be coming together at another school but it ultimately led nowhere — a fortunate turn of events, as it turned out.
Eventually, after Georgia made a coaching change and brought in Tom Black as head coach, with Aaron Benning joining him as the recruiting coordinator, an initial connection was made, but only after Rothenberger's pursuit of Georgia "started all over again."
"They were going to come see me at one tournament but I'd gotten a concussion and I wasn't there, so that was heartbreaking for me," she said.
Rothenberger had already been accepted at UGA and was visiting campus, and she stopped by a practice to meet the coaches. It was her first face-to-face interaction with Black and the coaches and players.
"I didn't get to talk to [Black] that much, I was just there observing and stuff, but I just knew that he was set on a mission to bring this program up and get everybody on his new system," she said. "It was really cool;Â you just knew there was going to be something big coming."
Soon after, Black finally got to see her play, at a club tournament in Louisville.Â
Said Black: "It was really late in the game. ... She kept on us and her family has ties to Georgia, so I finally took a look at her super late in her senior year and there's this kid just balling out. (Laughs) I couldn't believe it, like, 'How are you still available?' She was like, 'I just really wanted to come to Georgia.' As soon as I saw her, we took her. It was a no-brainer."
A "no-brainer" several years in the making.
In the end, after all of that, the false starts, the coaching change, the wondering and waiting, the pursuit on her end that was far more persistent than it was on Georgia's, the phone call finally came — preceded by a text message.
Rothenberger said she was eating lunch at school not long after that big tournament when she got a text from Benning, who told her to expect a call from a California number — Black is a Southern California native that was coaching at Loyola Marymount before coming to Athens. Then, at last, came the call.
"I got a call and Tom was like, 'Hey, do you want to be a Dawg?' And I was like, 'Yeah,'" Rothenberger recalled, adding that the moment, the one she'd waited and hoped for, "It was really cool."
Black, talking about Rothenberger over tacos last week, seems quite happy with how it all worked out, too: "We got lucky; she's a stud."
After redshirting as a freshman last season, Georgia's first under Black and his staff, Rothenberger has played in every set this fall (one of only four Bulldogs to do so). Her 148 digs are fourth on the team behind stalwart starters Kendall Glover (345), T'ara Ceasar (215) and Meghan Donovan (177).
Heading into Friday's match at Stegeman Coliseum against No. 14 Kentucky, Rothenberger has had double-digit digs in four of her last five matches.
"I think this season, it's been so much fun and a big learning curve for me since it's been my first season on the court," she said. "I'm not really focused on the numbers, I didn't even know I had double-digit digs, I've just been focused on what I can do to play better for my setter: get the ball up, keep the ball in play. It's just been really fun."
While Rothenberger is at Georgia, her older brother Brad and her twin brother Matthew are at Alabama, which made for quite the family gathering during the College Football Playoff title game back in January.
"That whole time [Georgia was leading], I was giving a little more smack talk than I should have been," she said, "because it was looking promising for us at first, and all the sudden at the end I was like, 'Oh, no. I don't think I can live that one down to this day.'"
When Georgia and Alabama play in sports other than volleyball, things can get "a little cutthroat" between the siblings in the SEC. But when she's on the court, "I think at the end of the day they're secretly Bulldog fans, because they're always my No. 1 fans supporting me."
They're supporting her and the Bulldogs because she really, really wanted to attend Georgia, and she pursued and persisted until she made it happen. And she remains thrilled she's here.
"I just know there were a lot of times when I'd be walking around campus and looking around like, I couldn't see myself doing this at any other school," she said. "Everything here's just absolutely beautiful, I just love it."
John Frierson is the staff writer for the UGA Athletic Association and curator of the ITA Men's Tennis Hall of Fame. You can find his work at: Frierson Files. He's also on Twitter: @FriersonFiles and @ITAHallofFame.
