Draft Prospect Profile: OPP Amanda Rice
The Wolfpack's leading attacker is athletic and powerful, which is as good a foundation as you could ask for.
Talent evaluation takes on a hundred different forms, but no matter the sport or level of competition, the question at its root is whether you believe in a player. That’s why, in the days after I had the chance to talk about opposite hitter Amanda Rice with Luka Slabe, who leads NC State’s volleyball team, this simple statement stood out in my brain:
“We want more Amandas in our program.”
It doesn’t get much more unambiguous. Rice has a believer in her head coach. She had already committed to the Wolfpack when Slabe took the top job at NC State, but the two have had a fruitful partnership as she has grown into her role and eventually took on the mantle of the team’s leading hitter as a junior.
“She was the one that cleaned up a mess for us very, very often. Setting Amanda – it’s not the easiest thing, because it’s fast and she’s a lefty, so that requires a little bit of a different set. But, our setters have been very successful at finding her and she has been very successful at adjusting to a variety of sets and play sets,” said Slabe.
She’s an assertive and immensely confident player who takes pride in her ability to hit the ball hard. Frankly, she’s earned every ounce of that confidence. During the 2023 season, she hit .297, came up big in NC State’s upset win over Louisville, and finished the year with an otherworldly error-free 16-for-24 performance in the season finale against Virginia.
“They’re expecting me to, um, blast them in the face,” she said with such heavy emphasis that I couldn’t help but chuckle. “So, I’ve been working on my range, like hitting across the court, down the line, deep corner, tipping it behind the block, and I’ve also gotten really good at just swiping it off the blockers’ hands and out of bounds. That’s probably one of my favorite go-to shots when I’m in a tight situation.”
What propelled Rice into a prominent role was more than just flashy, big-time kills. She’s put in work to become a more complete and reliable player, including both practice and loads of film study, with pretty encouraging results.
“That’s easily how points get wasted in an actual game, it’s just not being ready because you think the ball’s not gonna be hit at you. When I was a freshman, I would be super surprised and the ball would just bounce off me, ‘cause I wasn’t ready. Nowadays, I have a great reaction time. I’m getting myself open and making these super high IQ volleyball plays, placing the ball where I need to place it instead of just wailing it out of bounds because I know I’m not in the right spot,” she said.
Not allowing the ball to find you is a core principle of Slabe’s coaching philosophy. He finds that unready players make routine plays look difficult. The numbers bear out that Rice has outgrown that stage of her career as well. Across the last two season, she has a nearly identical number of attack errors – 116 in 2022 and 119 in 2023 – but her total attacks in 2023 far outpaced the year prior. That means the percentage of her attacks that resulted in errors dropped from 19.9 percent to 16.6 percent last year.
“I think we struck the balance with her where she’s absolutely dedicated to this, mindful, asking questions, more detail oriented. It takes what it takes, and suddenly, Amanda’s a better volleyball player,” Slabe said.
For Rice, who has plans to pursue a Master’s degree with the NC State microbial biotechnology program at some point, there’s more to life than the game. Stepping out of my shoes as a sportswriter, I will always support athletes in their choices to pursue a fulfilling off-court life. However, when it comes to investing resources in a player who may get wandering eyes, teams tend to think twice.
While she hasn’t closed her mind to the possibility of a professional career, I got the sense that she wouldn’t very willing to scrap and claw for opportunities like another player might. “I would love, maybe, to play professionally for a couple years in the United States and then maybe find some other career outside of volleyball. I just don’t want it to become part of my sole identity,” said Rice. Some teams believe that talent is all that matters, but unless her desire to be a professional grows into certainty in the coming months, I would expect that the majority will see her as potentially incompatible with their ideal team culture.
When it comes to on-court performance, the area where Rice is looking to boost her value as a senior is back row defense. The Wolfpack ran a 6-2 system for the bulk of 2023, meaning that Rice was hardly ever utilized in the back row or at the service line. For the supremely confident Rice, that was frustrating at times, especially because she hit four aces in a game against Utah Valley and then wasn’t afforded the opportunity to prove it wasn’t a fluke in conference play.
With the time they have left together, Slabe said he wants to see Rice grow into a more complete player, capable of digging and setting out of system balls. If she can perform well outside of plays designed for her to clobber the ball, she has the potential to be one of the ACC’s very best.
Slabe also offered a sunny opinion about her defensive play during recent spring scrimmages, saying this: “Amanda’s getting better at that aspect as well, that she can dig a ball not only that’s hit right at her, but she’s gonna dig that ball that’s not hit right at her. She’s gonna sprint and run and use an emergency move and we have a play. We can win this rally. In the past, that was not the case.”
From the outside looking in, Rice seems to run very hot and cold. Her .297 hitting percentage isn’t exactly representative of what you can expect from her on any given night. In 2023, she had nine games with a sub-.200 hitting percentage and another twelve hitting over .360. It’s what a stats nerd might call a bimodal data set and a radio personality would call infuriatingly streaky. As a senior, it would be nice to see her smooth out those peaks and valleys and demonstrate better game to game consistency.
Despite that, it’s fun to dream on what she could be. Athletic, powerful, and intelligent, she’s only been playing since her sophomore year of high school and has risen to the top of the high majors. When things are clicking, she’s a ton of fun to watch. She described her style by saying “more often than not, I am just gonna go up there and blast the ball however I can.” I couldn’t possibly sum it up better.
Some quotes were lightly altered for clarity. For transcripts of the interviews quoted, click here. To watch full NC State games, click here and here.