Charger Chatter: Haylee Booms

Home Sports Charger Chatter: Haylee Booms

Junior Haylee Booms plays right-side hitter on the women’s volleyball team. Booms was recently named GLIAC South Division Player of the Week. A pre-med student from Marysville, Michigan, Booms is majoring in Spanish and wants to attend medical school after graduating from Hillsdale College.

 

How do you feel about being named GLIAC South Player of the Week?

Well it’s just exciting, I guess I never got it before, so it’s just cool, but really the only reason I got it or was able to be recognized is because the team was successful.

 

When did you first start focusing on volleyball? Did you play any other sports?

Yeah actually, I played every sport, basically ever. I think I started volleyball in fifth grade, but my first sport was soccer in first grade. I played all of them, softball, track, basketball, you name it.

 

What’s your best moment been as a Charger?

My freshman year we went to regional finals and we got to play against our pretty  much all-time rival from a different conference, and that was just really fun experience. Also, we went to Italy and Austria not this summer but last summer, and that was just really cool, being able to spend a ton of time with pretty much all my best friends from school, being in a different country and experiencing a whole different culture.

 

What did you do when you were there?

We only had four games, but we played one club team and three other teams were professional, and that was really cool because they were amazing, and it was a big-time game, and they had an announcer and announced our names and we all ran out of a big tunnel. Nobody really knew what was going on because it was all in a different language.

We did a ton of stuff, we went up mountains, visited Mozart’s house, went to a lot of museums and a lot of royalty things, I think there were a lot of castles and palaces and stuff like that. It’s so pretty over there.

 

What do you do outside of the volleyball team?

Last year I had a job working at the hospital as a scribe, taking notes and stuff for doctors. It’s basically like shadowing a doctor, but doing more of their work and interpreting test results and stuff for them.

 

Why did you decide to major in Spanish, then?

Well for medical school you don’t have to major in bio, even though most people do because most of the classes we take are bio, so it’s easier. I didn’t decide I wanted to do it fully until the end of my freshman year, and it would have been easier to do a different major I was already in instead of changing to bio because I might have had to stay a fifth year. Also, I just really like Spanish and want to be able to travel abroad and speak the language, or possibly even live in Spain for a while. Or possibly even southern California or southern Texas where there’s a bunch of Spanish people.

 

How do you feel about the rest of the volleyball season?

Excited. We’re ready to go, we set goals for ourselves, and we have goals for every portion of the season so they keep us on track, but just always excited. Playing with the team, we get along so well and work so hard, that we’re just excited to show everybody what we can do.

 

How do you get ready for a game?

We have a pregame routine, kinda just bump and listen to music in our suite before we do anything. We try to watch inspirational videos, not just volleyball, we’ll watch Michael Jordan’s greatest plays or we’ll watch Dalhausser, who’s a beach volleyball player, we’ll watch him block because he’s just amazing. All cool sports videos that kinda get you pumped and make you want to play really well.

We have pregame meal, so we’ll go eat and then come back and do some of the same thing, then we’ll go and do some mental work, where you isolate yourself in an area away from anybody else and away from distractions and go through in your head all the motions you do during in the game. So I just visually picture myself blocking this way, blocking that way, digging, serving, basically every skill that you do you envision it before it actually happens.

Me and my friends too, we have a routine where we go past the gym, then we’ll do a little Chinese fire drill really quick and then come back around. It’s just a really fun thing that we do just to stay loose, I guess.

 

How is playing in the new arena?

It’s awesome. Our school is so great and we have such great athletes and everything and it’s nice to finally have a gym that represents that. I think we used to be the gym where people would walk in and take us as a joke because it would literally just be a court in the middle of a track, so now it’s nice to have a really nice gym to play in, so it’s great that the school could give us that. We have a brand new locker room too, which is awesome.