Name: Gabe Polyak

School: Glenbard East, senior

Sport: Volleyball

Why he was selected: Polyak had 37 kills and 15 digs as Glenbard East won the championship of the Oswego Invitational.

He was voted the Athlete of the Week in an online vote. Other nominees were Downers Grove North track and field’s Philip Cupial, Downers Grove South track and field’s Karen Boakye and Lemont baseball’s Cannon Madej.

Here is Polyak’s interview with Sports Editor Joshua Welge.

Your team is off to a 6-0 start. How do you feel about how you’re playing and what’s been the keys to team success?

Polyak: I feel like I have been playing better now than I did last year, and I can greatly attribute this to my coaches and teams that I have played with at Future and at Glenbard East. My Coach Jackie, Coach Wiggins, and Coach Cardott have all taught me many new things about volleyball and helped me hone my skills even further. However, the season has just started and I still for sure have areas to improve, but my team so far has backed me up whenever I failed to keep our team to the 6-0 record.

What are some goals for the season?

Polyak: I think that my main personal goal for this season is just to enjoy it as it will go until the end of my time at high school, though I also want to continue to get better as the season goes on. We as a team have lots of goals for what we want out of our season and we already got one of them by winning the tournament this past weekend. Some of the other things that we hope to do this season are to beat our rivals, win conference, win regionals, and go as far as we can from there. At the start of the season we thought a couple of these might have been a little bit far-fetched especially with one of our starters from last year being injured, but we are still going strong so I think we can totally achieve them.

How long have you played volleyball? How’d you get into the sport and what do you like about it?

Polyak: I have actually played volleyball since I was in fifth grade. I started playing on the middle school varsity team at St. John’s where I was the sixth person on the team and played with my two older brothers. I really got into the sport because of my older brothers and followed in their footsteps as a setter for a while until halfway through freshman year when I switched over to playing as an outside where I have stayed. I feel like my favorite parts about volleyball are how fast paced it is and how team oriented the sport is. The game almost never has long pauses and has lots of huge plays that keep the game interesting. And without a good team, one good player will never be able to shine. You need to have good passing, setting, attacking, and blocking all together for a good team and you need to rely on other people to help make plays and that’s what makes it so much fun.

Have you played other sports?

Polyak: I have tried out many different sports like soccer as a kid, basketball and track in middle school, and golf in high school, but while I really liked those, they just didn’t fit with me like volleyball did. Even though they weren’t my favorite sport, I believe that they helped make me more fit and ready to play volleyball now.

So, it being spring break, what’s a place in the country or world you’d like to visit some day?

Polyak: While I want to travel the world and see lots of places I don’t have many specific places that I want to see. The only one that I know for sure is to go to Croatia because I have some family there and I have heard that it is very nice. Aside from that though, I’d love to see places like Rome, Paris, and all of the other popular places that people like to go to.

What are your post-high school plans if you know them?

Polyak: Right now I am fully planning on attending Augustana College for mechanical engineering and playing D3 volleyball there. I am really looking forward to it as I have been talking to the coach for almost a year and I have gotten much better since then. I just know that I don’t want to stop being an athlete yet as I know I have room to improve and don’t want to give it up.