Like the two sisters before her, Plant senior Sarah Kirkwood succeeds in the classroom and on the court.
By EMILY NIPPS
Published December 19, 2003
TAMPA - Plant senior Sarah Kirkwood knows how other parents can be sometimes. She's certain her father, Peter, has caught flak for pushing her and her sisters too hard, for expecting too much.
One memory from when she was small stands out. She, her father and her older sisters, Emily and Allison, would go for long runs together. People probably believed the girls were too young, Peter too demanding.
"I think people just don't know our personalities," Sarah said.
Take Sarah herself, for example, the quintessential Kirkwood. She has never gotten a "B" despite a schedule filled with Advanced Placement classes. She has excelled at nearly every sport she has tried, and she is unabashedly intense in almost every situation.
The youngest of three overachieving children, her explanation for her success is simple: She never really had a choice to do otherwise. And it's not because her parents pushed her. It's because she naturally wanted to live up to the level of her sister Emily (11 months older), who was trying to live up to the level of Allison (two years older than Emily).
"If Allison started swimming at age 6, Emily and I would start at age 4," Sarah said. "We always got a head start. I love being the youngest because I learned from their mistakes. I never had to learn anything the hard way."
Not that a ton of mistakes were made along the way. Sarah insists there was no pressure, though.
"If you could just see our house ... ," she said.
The Kirkwoods live in a normal home in a normal neighborhood. The Kirkwood's are, by most standards, normal.
And considering a far from normal life, Sarah actually is pretty normal.
She has her quirks, such as when she falls into a deep, dark sleep and can't be woken by anything. She can sit and eat a bowl of cereal while watching someone on TV get their chest cracked open for heart surgery. But if her boyfriend, Nate, must crack his knuckles, he has to warn her so she can plug her ears and hum out the noise.
She also has her strengths, which are almost too many to count. At 15, she was believed to be the only Florida athlete to attempt to win a state volleyball and state swimming title (in either the 50- or 100-yard freestyles) in the same season. She fell .86 seconds shy in the 50.
The 5-foot-11 hitter led the Panthers to three state titles and recently signed with Virginia, where Emily, who was the Times co-player of the year in 2002, is a freshman setter.
"She's not going to a powerhouse volleyball school," Karla Kirkwood, Sarah's mother, said. "She chose someplace she could succeed academically because she knows volleyball is temporary."
Sarah scored a perfect 800 in math on her SATs (1470 total), a rare accomplishment. She was recently chosen as one of 10 finalists for national senior volleyball player of the year by prepvolleyball.com after recording 428 kills, 51 ace blocks and 114 ace serves.
Even with all of this, Sarah said people shouldn't be impressed. Scholar athletes such as her come along every so often.
What people should be impressed with is she is the third All-America athlete among three sisters and the third to go to one of the country's top universities. (Allison is a junior at Stanford.)
"If you look at it, it's really the end of something special," Sarah said. "It's going to be so weird because our dad won't be cutting out newspaper articles and putting them on the fridge anymore."
The youngest Kirkwood, who turned 18 on Thursday, graduates high school in the spring. She will join her sisters at the next level of competition, where the awards and newspaper articles and championships will be fewer and far between.
The end of something special? Some people might believe so.
Then again, people just don't know their personalities.
