PARIS – At 14, Dana Rettke’s best friend, Molly Gates, suggested she join her volleyball club so they could spend more time together.
Rettke was a talented basketball player with dreams of playing in college and the WNBA. Already well over 6 feet heading into high school, the Riverside native for years had shot down her mother’s advice to give volleyball a chance.
A best friend’s suggestion, however, was something different.
“My mom had been begging me to try volleyball for years and I was like ‘no, no, no.’ I was just so resistant to it,” Rettke told the Tribune. “But once Molly started playing and she thought I should do it, too, it seemed like a good idea.”
There are good ideas. There are great ideas. And, if you’re Dana Rettke, there are ideas that put you on a path to becoming a member of the U.S. women’s Olympic volleyball team.
“I didn’t know if I would even like the sport,” she said. “But obviously I fell in love with it.”
Gates was in the stands earlier this week, when Rettke, 25, made her Olympic debut in a win over France. The U.S. team finished pool play with a 2-1 record, advancing to Tuesday’s quarterfinal match against Poland.
Best friends since kindergarten, Rettke and Gates shared a quick hug after the match in an area specifically designated for the athletes’ families. Their shared history – and its role in getting Rettke to Paris – was not lost on either of them.
“This is probably one of the greatest best-friend jobs ever,” Gates said of traveling to France to see Rettke play in the Olympics. “Like, screw the maid of honor speech. This is top tier.”
Soon after Rettke joined Gates’ volleyball team, word began circulating that a small, suburban Chicago club had a 6-foot-6 middle blocker. Suddenly, college coaches and scouts began showing up at practices and matches to check Rettke out.
Kelly Sheffield, the head coach at the University of Wisconsin, watched Rettke play at one of her earliest tournaments. He had never recruited a player who had started the sport so late and he wasn’t particularly impressed with what he saw on the court.
“Let’s just say it was an adventure watching her and her team that first time,” Sheffield told the Tribune. “There wasn’t much to evaluate.”
Later in the tournament, Sheffield saw Rettke dribbling a volleyball and doing footwork drills. She had enough raw athleticism and coordination to stop him from writing her off completely.
When she attended a Wisconsin volleyball camp about a month later, her game had improved, which showed that she could learn quickly.
“That’s a pretty good combination right there,” Sheffield said. “If it had been her fifth year playing, I’d be concerned. But that’s not where she was.”
Rettke, who grew to 6-foot-8 during high school, signed with Wisconsin her sophomore year in high school, based solely on Sheffield’s belief that she could develop into a great player. As a result, Rettke voluntarily stopped playing basketball despite being an All-State honorable mention in her second year with the team and switched to a more competitive volleyball club.
She graduated a semester early from Riverside-Brookfield High School and headed to Madison, Wisc., assuming that playing Big Ten volleyball would be an amazing end to an accidental volleyball career. Her perspective, however, changed a short time later when Badger legend Lauren Carlini approached her at training.
Carlini, a former West Aurora High School standout who had just finished her collegiate career, had helped lead Wisconsin to the NCAA Final Four in 2013 and played on the U.S. volleyball team that won a bronze medal at the Pan American Cup in 2016. She was the standard by which Rettke and her college teammates measured themselves.
Carlini asked, have you ever thought about playing for the national team?
Rettke, stunned by the mere suggestion, said she hadn’t.
“You can do it,” Carlini recalled telling her. “Believe in yourself, because you can do it.”
Carlini, who also made the 2024 Olympic team as a setter, told the Tribune she approached Rettke that day in the Badger fieldhouse because supporting other Wisconsin athletes is important to her. More than that, she said, she recognized something special in Rettke.
“You can see it in her agility and in her drive. And I told her so,” Carlini said. “Sometimes, telling someone that they have potential, that they have the ability, can be the start of something great.”
After taking advantage of the extra year afforded to athletes because of COVID, Rettke went on to become the first five-time All-American volleyball player in NCAA history and led the Badgers to a national title in 2021. She made her national team debut in 2019 as one of only three college players to compete in the Nations League, one of the sport’s most important international tournaments.
She was named to her first Olympic team in June and has taken on a reserve role at the Paris Games.
It’s a surreal accomplishment, Rettke says, for someone who only started playing the sport a decade ago because her best friend suggested it. Most of her teammates began playing when they were in grade school.
But Gates – who has been to many of Rettke’s big matches and has traveled to Italy to see her play professionally – sees it a bit differently.
“It might have been my idea at first,” she said. “But Dana could have let the opportunity pass her by. She could have stopped after college and just had a normal life. But she put in the work and pushed through the hard days. She’s the one who made the decision to be one of the greats.”
