Ava Ball has long been a talented player posting gaudy numbers for a strong program. But her junior year of volleyball at Nova Classical Academy marked significant growth for the outside hitter.

Because she was asked to do it all, all the time.

Graduating six seniors — including two all-state players and a libero who Knights coach Tom Dobbs believed also could have earned that distinction — from a year ago, much of the onus for this year’s squad fell on Ball’s shoulders.

“She’s the hub of the wheel. Everything revolves around her,” Dobbs said. “I think everyone knows that.”

Which can be a major burden for a player. But Ball answered the call every time. The end result was a wildly successful season by team and individual standards. Despite the massive roster turnover, Nova Classical Academy returned to the Class 2A, Section 4 final.

As for Ball? The South Dakota commit finished this season with a jaw-dropping and state-best 633 kills. That is why she is the 2023 East Metro volleyball player of the year.

“You grow so much in club (volleyball),” Ball said. “But in like the situation I was in this year, I think I grew a lot more than I have in past seasons, because I was so heavily relied on.”

If anyone is built to handle such responsibilities, it’s Ball. She grew up with three sisters who were heavily involved in the sport. Dobbs remembered seeing her walking around gyms when she was a little girl.

Ball noted how much she soaked in just watching her sisters — her biggest mentors — play. That information gathering laid a strong foundation for the high IQ player she has become.

That growth only continues.

“I think I’ve definitely grown a lot mentally. Through club, that was a lot of my focus,” Ball said. “So with that mental piece, my gameplay took off from there. Because when you have that mental piece down, the little things start to click.”

Dobbs recalled a two-game stretch this season in which Ball notched 73 kills. Twice this fall she threatened the state record for kills in a match, which Dobbs said is 48.

Ball is a high-level athlete. But anyone going up for that many attacks has to have a wide array of shots in her arsenal to keep a defense on its heels.

“We work a lot in practice on shot selection and choices, and knowing that an off-speed ball can score in the same ways that a thunderous attack to the 10-foot line can score,” Dobbs said. “And she’s smart that way. … You realize that you can’t just swing hard. You’ve got to be smart.”

Especially when you’re attacking from every spot on the court. Ball’s back-row attacks were an equally-large part of the Knights’ offense. She was a constant threat. Pair that with her ability to contribute defensively, and she truly is a well-rounded player.

“She checks all the boxes,” Dobbs said.

And she always is looking for more. Her intangibles are what Dobbs believes separates the junior from the pack.

“Her demeanor is very focused and driven. She has a very high ceiling. Her volleyball IQ is tremendous. She competes always, but she’s very calm, and she’s very, very humble. She’s demonstrative on the court, but it’s never directed at the other team. It’s always directed at her supporting cast, her teammates,” Dobbs said. “She’s a fierce competitor, and I feel like that’s maybe the biggest thing is that everything counts, everything matters, whether it’s getting to practice on time, helping the team mentally, leading by example physically on the court and off.”

That’s how you grow into the statistical juggernaut Ball has become. She’s right around 1,600 kills for her career. Ball laughed as she admitted she, too, is a little surprised sometimes by her production. Reaching 2,000 career kills is not only a possibility, but a likelihood next season.

“That would be such a special thing to accomplish,” Ball said. “So, hopefully I can get there.’”

Ball admitted she was nervous about the increased responsibilities heading into the season. But, by season’s end, she noted “this is a lot of fun.”

“Everyone stepped up to play their role,” she said.

And Ball was the rising tide that raised all boats.

“One of the things that makes her great, too, is her team. … It’s parents, it’s the school, it’s her club. We like to describe our team at Nova as everyone in the gym,” Dobbs said. “If you could see not only the support, but the respect. You look at some of the younger players, they look at her like kids look at professional athletes, really understanding that, ‘Wow, you’re in the presence of someone really spectacular here.’ And I think they really embrace that.”

Finalists

Mesaiya Bettis, junior outside hitter, Burnsville: Iowa State commit tallied 455 kills this fall for the Blaze.

Hadley Burger, senior outside hitter, East Ridge: Multi-faceted threat helped East Ridge remain in top five of state rankings for much of season.

Rayna Christianson, sophomore setter, Lakeville North: Athletic and good at seemingly everything, Christianson figures to have the Panthers in title contention for years to come.

Audrey Kocon, senior setter, Mounds View: Providence commit is a great setter who also sports a dangerous swing.

Paige Wagner, senior middle hitter, Lakeville South: Michigan Tech commit had 243 kills for the Cougars.

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A social media post led to a gun being found at a St. Paul high school Tuesday.

Harding Senior High School on the East Side received a tip Tuesday morning about a post that a student might have a gun, according to a letter sent to families from Principal Tony Chlebecek.

Police searched and found the gun. “No threats were made and no one was injured,” Chlebecek wrote. “As soon as a report of a weapon was made, administration and our on-site security staff quickly responded, followed our safety procedures, which included putting the school into a hold in place.”

He urged members of the “Harding community to say something if you see or hear any safety concerns.”

“If you have any weapons in your home, make sure they are safely stored and not accessible,” he wrote.

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So you want to try birdwatching, or as some of us call it, birding.

Something about our feathered friends has grabbed your attention. A great-horned owl, perhaps, hooting outside your window after dusk. Or an American robin slurping worms from your lawn. Maybe you spied a group of birdwatchers at the park across the street, hot on the trail of a rare warbler and, well, you want in on the action.

Could be you simply overheard the ongoing debate of birb, borb or floof. Translation: which bird is cute, which bird is round, which bird is fluffy? You will have opinions on this – I know I do.

Or maybe you’ve had a “spark bird,” a creature so magnificent, it sparked your interest in birding.

BirdNote, a popular radio show, provides wonderful two-minute stories on how birds capture our imaginations. When I was on the show, I told interviewer Mark Bramhill my spark bird was a Vermillion Flycatcher, a glorious ruby. It’s a shining jewel of plumage and attitude. This bird is a show-off. Within a few months of spotting my first one, I was hooked.

Soon, I was tweeting endless images of birds I’d seen. That’s how “BirdNote” found me. And that was my first lesson in the benefit of birding: Capturing our excitement about nature can help lure others into the same appreciation for birds and the discovery that they can inform your life, send you on adventures, involve you in mystery.

The thing about birding is anyone can do it. Old, young, disabled, experienced, inexperienced. And you can bird just about anywhere: a park, a city street, a forest, along a shore, deep within a nature preserve.

Tools of birding

Get yourself a copy of “The Sibley Guide to Birds: Second Edition,” which brims with wonderful drawings as well as quick reference guides for how to examine field marks and body types.

Lightweight birding “bins” — binoculars — make all the difference. The full wealth of bird colors can’t be seen without binoculars. And that bird perched 50 yards away in a tree? You won’t see every field mark, and might not be able to see if it has stripes on its tail. Bins range from a low-end $50 pair to get you in the game up to thousands of dollars.  I found my $450 Zeiss on “The Audubon Guide to Buying Binoculars.” That $50 pair is listed there too.

Let’s talk apps, too, because we’re in a birding revolution. Tech is rapidly approaching the ability to fully identify all birds within your listening range, and apps like Merlin Bird ID can help you identify birds you’re hearing and seeing. From what I’ve seen, it’s about 80 percent accurate. Your experience and common sense will help you know when any app is fooling you. That jackhammer a mile away? It’s not a Pileated Woodpecker no matter what your phone says.

Sign up for eBird or iNaturalist so you can log birds from trails and submit your checklists for approval by county moderators. Logging birds helps you keep track of your lists, your overall counts at hotspots (in your county, state, country) and life birds (bird species you’ve seen over time). You can also use your phone to record birdsong and upload your audio.

Keeping online bird lists also connects you to the greater birding collective. The data you provide helps ornithologists understand migration patterns and nesting habits and connects you to other birders.

A camera helps you capture the sights and provide proof, especially when you find a rarity. I use a Nikon P950 point-and-shoot that has a built-in super zoom. It literally has a “birding” setting. It isn’t perfect, but it’s light and it does the job. (I used to take pics through my binoculars with my iPhone, too.)

Birding adventures

You can stick to your backyard for your birdventures, if you’d like. Put out a dish of water or buy a bird bath, hang bird feeders, then peek out your windows and log all your feathered friends.

Or you can go all in, hike up mountain trails, walk boardwalks and grassland trails, hit nature preserves and state parks – with a friend or a whole group of fellow birders. Local birding groups — Audubon, MeetUps and more — organize outings, hold classes and offer field trips to local parks and preserves.

Most of my adventures are either solo or with one or two other birders. Recently, I joined Kai Mills, 23, a bird nest surveyor from Lafayette, to go birding at a nature preserve and a botanical garden along the central California coast. We were joined by Mike Bush, 70, a retired lecturer for horticulture and crop science who has been a director of botanical gardens in such places as Singapore, Bermuda and Oklahoma City. I met both of these experts while searching for birds.

At Sweet Springs Nature Preserve in Los Osos, I began telling Mills about a bird seen at the preserve, a real mystery. It was a half dark-eyed junco, half white-crowned sparrow – an intergeneric hybrid so rare there was no way to log it except as a generic sparrow species. Doing so loses this bird in eBird’s system. It becomes a nothing, an anomaly. Just as I mentioned the bird, Mills spotted it foraging at the base of a tree. Slightly larger than a junco, it shared field marks of both species. Even its song was a strange, junco-like trill that ended in “zeet zeet zeet.”

It felt like a victory to even find this bird — and that sense of discovery is half the appeal of birding.

Mills started birding when he was 12, back in Lafayette, where he’d visit a rare swamp sparrow every weekend. “I re-spotted it after it was originally found,” he said. “After that I was the first to find it every year for five winters.” He told me how he watched it join a sparrow flock, forage along reeds. “I knew its habits, where it would be at different times of the day.”

He said it was rewarding showing other birders that sparrow. He said it helped form his birding habits, and it’s why he stresses the importance of frequenting your local spaces.

“Find a local birding spot you really love,” he said when we discussed advice for new birders. “You can familiarize yourself with common birds and their songs that way. Do that before you start chasing other species.”

I took that advice to heart. I regularly visit a park near my home, and last year, found a golden-winged warbler, a bird so rare, it has been logged less than a hundred times in California. It’s only because I know that park so well, all its birds and birdsong, that I was able to be in position to spot this little bird foraging in a lemon tree.

Ask yourself: What might I discover?

Here’s the thing: birding can be consuming. You might aim for a Big Year – that’s what birders call a challenge to identify as many species as possible within a single calendar year and within a specific geographic area like a county, state, maybe even a five-mile radius from where you live – but it’s not really a game.

So make your birdventures count. Make them fun. Fill them with knowledge and wonder.

Resources

Audubon Society: Find Audubon guides to birding binoculars and other resources, including local chapters and some tongue-in-cheek explanations on the difference between borbs and floofs, at audubon.org.

eBird: Managed by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, eBird helps passionate birders and newbies alike find birding hotspots, track their finds and share their discoveries with fellow birders and the scientific community; ebird.org.

iNaturalist: This digital tool, a joint effort from the California Academy of Sciences and the National Geographic Society, lets you document not only Bay Area birds but flora and fauna of all kinds and share it with others; inaturalist.org.

Merlin Bird ID: This free app from the Cornell Lab helps you identify birds and bird songs, save birds to your life list and explore lists of birds near you; merlin.allaboutbirds.org.

BirdNote: These two-minute daily radio shows are broadcast on 250 NPR stations and via podcast. Listen at www.birdnote.org.

This story was originally published by Southern California News Group on July 28, 2022.

By Liz Weston | NerdWallet

The investing information provided on this page is for educational purposes only. NerdWallet, Inc. does not offer advisory or brokerage services, nor does it recommend or advise investors to buy or sell particular stocks, securities or other investments.

Many companies try to help their workers to save for retirement. Employers often offer 401(k)s, company matches and automatic enrollment to encourage saving.

Much of that effort goes to waste, though, when employees leave. A study published last year in Marketing Science, a peer-reviewed research journal, found more than 40% of departing workers cashed out at least part of their 401(k)s, and most of those drained every dime.

What’s more, employers may bear at least some of the blame, according to researchers Yanwen Wang of the University of British Columbia, Muxin Zhai of Texas State University and John Lynch Jr. of the University of Colorado.

The study, titled “Cashing Out Retirement Savings at Job Separation,” suggests generous company matches can make cashing out more tempting.

Cash-outs drain future retirement security

The researchers examined records of 162,360 employees who left jobs at 28 employers between 2014 and 2016. Of the 41.4% who cashed out retirement savings, about 64% took all the money out in one transaction, while 21% emptied their accounts with two or more withdrawals.

The people who took money out had smaller balances — $15,271 on average — compared with those who left their accounts in the employer plan ($69,546) or who rolled their savings into an IRA or a new employer plan ($67,353).

The damage from any 401(k) withdrawal is significant, however. Cash-outs trigger taxes and penalties that often equal 30% or more of the withdrawal, plus the loss of future tax-deferred compounded returns. Every $1,000 withdrawn at age 35 can mean about $8,000 less in retirement funds at age 65, assuming 7% average annual returns. So a $15,000 withdrawal could mean $120,000 less at retirement age. (The younger you are, the greater the damage; the same $15,000 withdrawal at age 25 could mean $240,000 less at retirement.)

Cashing out once is bad enough, but multiple job changes could lead to workers repeatedly draining their accounts, Wang says. The median job tenure, or time employees typically remain with an employer, is about five years, according to the Employee Benefit Research Institute. That can give workers many opportunities over a working lifetime to raid their retirement savings.

“Ultimately, you might be only left with the very last pile of money you accumulated from your job,” Wang says.

Necessity doesn’t drive most retirement plan cash-outs

Sometimes a premature withdrawal is the best of bad options. People may have pressing expenses and no other savings.

But relatively few workers cash out savings while they’re working, whether through hardship withdrawals or 401(k) loans that aren’t paid back, Wang says. And previous research shows that most people who cash out when they leave a job don’t need the money for emergencies or other pressing expenses, she says.

Wang’s team hypothesized that the composition of account balances might help explain why people cash out. Thanks to a behavioral quirk known as mental accounting, people tend to treat different pots of money differently, depending on the source. So we may be more likely to spend a $20 bill found on the street versus one that we earned on our own.

The researchers wondered if something similar happens when more of an account balance comes from employer matches versus employee contributions. Would people be more likely to see their 401(k) money as a windfall to be tapped rather than a resource to be protected? The researchers found that yes, bigger matches did influence cash-outs: A 50% increase in a company match raised the probability of a cash-out by 6.3%.

That’s not the only way our mental biases get us in trouble, Wang says. When people leave jobs, they’re typically told their retirement plan options — leave the money in the plan, roll it into an IRA or a new employer’s plan, or cash out. Often, though, they’re not given much guidance about the best course to take. Simply mentioning the cash-out option may make people more likely to see the money as a windfall, Wang says. Plus, cashing out may seem like the easiest course if people aren’t warned about the cumulative impact of withdrawing retirement money and aren’t sure whether or how to roll the money over.

How employers can counteract the temptation to cash out

The answer to reducing 401(k) “leakage” isn’t to discourage rich company matches but to encourage employers to understand and counteract the temptation to cash out, Wang says. Companies could provide financial education to departing employees, explaining the long-term impact of withdrawing retirement money prematurely.

“If they really care about their employees, they should provide more information,” she says.

Another option could be for the employer to offer separate emergency savings accounts in addition to retirement plans. That would give departing workers a source of funds to tap without penalty if they needed money. Having distinct accounts labeled for different purposes — “emergencies” versus “retirement” — could help people view their retirement savings as a resource for the future rather than a windfall to be spent today, Wang says.

This article was written by NerdWallet and was originally published by The Associated Press.

 

The article Does a 401(k) Employer Match Tempt You to Cash Out? originally appeared on NerdWallet.