by SEATTLE –Emoni Bush (Wei Wai Kum First Nation), one of Washington’s four commits for the class of 2021, has made the jump early. Bush graduated early from Carihi Secondary and enrolled at UW for the start of winter quarter, which just completed its first week. The native of Campbell River, British Columbia will get a jumpstart on her college classes and get a feel for NCAA training and competition though she will not be able to compete during Washington’s 2021 spring matches.
Bush is a 6-3 outside hitter recently named the unanimous 2020-21 B.C. Girls Player of the Year in a poll of Canadian collegiate coaches by Varsity Letters. She is part of Volleyball Canada’s National Excellence Program and started for Team Canada at the 2019 FIVB U18 World Championships in Egypt. Bush comes from an athletic family; her mother, Nadgelin Cliffe, played basketball at Langara College in Vancouver, B.C. and her father, Michael Bush, was a two-sport star for Washington State from 1998-2002, earning All-Pac-10 honorable mention in both football and basketball.
After having her in the gym for a week, Head Coach Keegan Cook said of Bush, “Talk about courage, you’ve got a foreign student-athlete who’s joining a team midway through the year at seventeen years old in the middle of a pandemic, so I give her a lot of credit for eagerness. She spent the fall in a pretty immersive national team program in Vancouver that served her really well with high-level volleyball. She’s already showing us glimpses of an outside hitter that can score the ball, which is something that means a lot to us. It’s a whirlwind for her and she’s handling it with a lot of maturity and poise and I’m really excited about her future. She will enter her freshman year in the fall with an experience few get.”
