At least half the Designated Writers team was at church Sunday and, Lord have mercy, there was our friend Danielle Scott, a Baton Rouge native who still lives there and was in June inducted into the Louisiana Sports Hall of Fame. She was in town, as she was in the spring, to help promote Team USA’s FIVB Volleyball Intercontinental Olympic Qualification Tournament at CenturyLink Center Aug. 2-4.

It’s a big deal for these parts.Tickets are $35 and $45 through CenturyLink.

Kazakhstan (had to look it up), Argentina and Bulgaria, each a Top 25 team in the world, are the other competitors, along with the USA Volleyball National Team. The winner winner chicken dinner earns a spot in the 2020 Tokyo Olympic Games.

Scott is qualified to rep the sport here for some solid reasons:

— She left Baton Rouge to star at Long Beach State where she was an All-America player and National Player of the Year in 1993 when she led Long Beach State to an NCAA title. She also played hoops.

— She’s a five-time Olympian–think about how hard that is to accomplish–on every USA team from 1996-2012 and earned two medals.

— She was World Grand Prix MVP in 2001.

–She was inducted into the International Volleyball Hall of Fame in 2016.

But here’s the biggest thing: last spring, USA Volleyball presented Scott with its Courage Award because last autumn, Scott suffered serious stab wounds while trying to protect her sister from her sister’s estranged husband; Danielle’s sister died in the attack.

Yet Danielle, during all the festivities during Induction Weekend in Natchitoches in June and yesterday at church, was the Human Smile, a hugger and a spreader of good cheer, a doting mom with a spirit of goodness she can’t hide.

For the LSWA, our friend Robin Fambrough of The Advocate wrote a really good story about this really good person if you want to know more about our friend Danielle.

https://www.theadvocate.com/acadiana/sports/article_5a495d08-8545-11e9-9bbb-bb558caec602.html

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