Thursday, Jan. 23, 2025 | 2 a.m.
At one of her first practices as a professional volleyball player, Berkeley Oblad’s coach drew up a play on a clipboard and went into detail about what he wanted.
Oblad couldn’t understand any of it. That’s because the coach was speaking Hungarian.
“I was like, well, I hope this is the same volleyball because I’m just going to go out there and play how I know to play,” Oblad recently recalled.
The Coronado High School and University of Utah graduate spent her rookie season in Kaposvar, Hungary, a town two hours south of Budapest with a population about a third of her Henderson hometown.
The 27-year-old’s path isn’t all that different from the scores of the best American volleyball players who for decades have been forced to go overseas if they want to continue their athletic careers.
But that could be ending as the United States-based Pro Volleyball Federation (PVF) stages its second season domestically. Oblad has played in the league since the beginning and is back again as one of the standout players on the local Vegas Thrill, which plays its home games at Lee’s Family Forum in Henderson.
The Thrill started the season 3-1 with Oblad ranking in the league’s top 10 with a 43.1% kill percentage. She still describes it as surreal that she’s getting to live out her volleyball dreams so close to where they started, after initially playing entire eight- to nine-month seasons in Kaposvar, Paris and Taiwan.
“I’m so grateful for those experiences,” Oblad said. “I learned so much. Getting to be entrenched in new cultures like that was the best way to do it, but it’s so hard. I loved changing things up, living in new cities and new places, but it’s nice to be comfortable sometimes.”
Oblad breaks from some of her peers—her Thrill teammates include volleyball luminary/former Olympian Alisha Glass Childress, who leads the league in assists through four games—in that she was never completely set on playing volleyball for as long as she could. It just kind of happened.
Oblad has twice thought she was done playing professionally, once for injury and another time to pursue coaching, but teams kept calling and she kept coming back. The PVF specifically was too much to pass up, especially with the Thrill employing longtime mentor Ruben Herrera as team president and Hall of Famer Fran Flory as coach.
“I prepared myself that, hey, you’re going to be done with volleyball pretty quickly after college,” Oblad said. “I wasn’t just a volleyball player, so I knew if it was done I would be OK. I truly didn’t expect it to last this long because there were so many other passions that I wanted to go explore. It’s not what I expected at all but I’m beyond grateful because it’s given me more opportunities than I ever imagined I could experience.”
Oblad’s constant outside of volleyball has been photography. She’s still considering pursuing wedding photography when her playing days are over.
She majored in graphic design at Utah and hasn’t stopped honing those skills in her spare time. Recently, she started sewing her own clothes and has a made a tentative goal to someday launch her own handmade collection.
“Athletics and art seem to be quite opposite things but it’s really neat that I get to do both of them in a sense, in my own way,” Oblad said.
Oblad has seen the value in growing something from the ground up with the local volleyball scene. She started playing at eight years old and describes the local community for the sport back then as lacking.
There were only four club teams, to her recollection, and they all mostly got wrecked when they ventured to tournaments outside of the area. She started to see some change by her senior year of high school, when she was named the 2014 Nevada Gatorade Player of the Year and a second-team Under Armour All-American, and can’t believe how far things have progressed since.
The presence of the Thrill has certainly helped, and Oblad’s expectations have been exceeded as far as younger fans of the sport showing up to watch the team’s matches.
“I don’t take any of that success on myself but I think it’s hard growing up and not having someone or something to look up to in the sport,” Oblad said. “There was college volleyball but that’s different. So just having this level of professionalism in this sport is exciting. It’s nice for the younger generation to have something to look up to.”
Oblad said she and her veteran teammates have joked with the rookies the last two years—Charitie Luper, the Thrill’s top draft pick this year, hails from the University of Louisville—that they’re spoiled and should be required to play one season internationally.
“You don’t even know what you’re missing,” Oblad said she tells them.
The naturally introverted Oblad still shudders when sharing stories about searching for food options late night in Kaposvar and having to try to navigate the language barrier to ask locals for help.
She only had a pair of teammates that spoke English in Taiwan, but her most memorable moment there came before sunrise one morning when one of them joined her for a hike up a mountain.
The pair complained after zapping themselves of energy with a bike ride across the city to the destination and then climbing more than 1,000 stairs. But, once at the summit, Oblad’s curiosity took over and she began navigating the jungle. She described an ensuing “amazing” experience where she and her teammate found a series of temples hidden in the mountain overlooking the island she describes as “Hawaii on steroids.”
That’s largely how Oblad has lived and treated her volleyball career, open to whatever comes her way.
“Being alone overseas is exhausting and frustrating in certain aspects, whereas here that emotional drain is gone,” Oblad said. “Practices are hard and so is trying to prepare for a match and not over-exerting. But emotionally, I feel like I have a lot more to give and it’s a lot easier to interact with your teammates when they all speak English.”
This story originally appeared in Las Vegas Weekly.