Asjia O’Neal’s decision to return for a sixth college volleyball season wasn’t an easy one.

As late as mid-October, she was leaning toward leaving.  After all, the Texas Longhorns had just captured that elusive national championship in her fifth year on campus. She could have ridden off into the sunset, and no one would have blamed her.

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So where was she going if she had left?

“Pro volley, “ she said after the Horns clinched a seventh straight Big 12 title with Wednesday’s 3-1 win over Iowa State.

And then there was this reason not to go:

“I wanted to stay with Jerry,” she said, hugging a smiling coach Jerritt Elliott.

Elliott, a legendary recruiter, helped convince her that a sixth year would be fun, even though the Horns would be without some familiar faces, such as AVCA national player of the year Logan Eggleston and All-America setter Zoe Fleck.

It could have made some sense to walk away and start her professional career, but something pulled her back for one more ride. Elliott was a factor. These two have been through it together, from the postseason disappointments of the past to being part of teams that didn’t always jell in the locker room to their satisfaction.

You’re not likely to find a more decorated coach-player combo in the country than Elliott, the two-time national champion and 15-time Big 12 champion, and O’Neal, the 6-foot-3 inch wall of a middle blocker who has rewritten the school record books as the career leader in blocks.

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She’s a self-made defender who admittedly wasn’t great at blocking when she arrived from Southlake Carroll in 2018. The deficiencies on defense were a large part of why Elliott elected to redshirt her that season.

“Jerritt told me I was a bad blocker,” O’Neal said, an ironic truth given that she’s the daughter of Jermaine O’Neal, a 6-11 veteran of 18 NBA seasons, who retired as the 23rd most prolific shot blocker in league history.

O’Neal’s Horns started the year as the AVCA preseason No. 1, a heavy favorite to become the first repeat national champion since Stanford in 2019. With Eggleston and Fleck no longer a part of the mix, the onus fell on O’Neal and All-America outside hitter Madisen Skinner to lead a battle-tested crew that also welcomed seven new faces to the roster.

She has it down now. The author of 551 rejections has gotten better with age. The older she gets, the more swats she posts. The progression is obvious, starting with her redshirt freshman season of 2019: 93, 113, 114 and then 117 in last season’s national title campaign.

The school career leader is on a monstrous pace in her final year with 114 and counting, including six against the Cyclones. She added six kills and five digs for good measure.

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At 20-4 overall and 15-1 in conference, the No. 5 Horns are rounding into nice form for the postseason, though a loss in a sweep at Kansas State on Nov. 8 was puzzling, given that Texas had won its last 13 games and nine consecutive sets entering the match.

The Cyclones could have gone down more easily Wednesday but stuck around and stole the second set 26-24, partly due to some leaky hitting when the hosts were 22-20, three points from a 2-0 lead.

“We said this was going to be one of our last three matches, and we hoped that would get challenged,” Elliott said. “We’ll learn from what happened from it, and we’ve got to deal with the choices and the lapses in concentration.”

Sometimes it takes time to find that sweet spot between the best physical rotation and the on-court chemistry that’s essential to the elite clubs. O’Neal and Skinner understand that as leaders they must help the staff figure out what it will take for Texas to be playing its best ball at the right time of the season.

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“I feel like we do a good job of fostering our relationships off the court,” Skinner said. “We’re able to build that cache, and they trust us and they know we want the best for them. Whenever we’re holding them accountable or we have those tough conversations, they know it’s out of a place of love.”

While the attacking numbers have suffered some drop-off with the loss of the greatest player in program history — Texas’ hitting percentage of .276 is down from the scary .336 the national champs put up while the kills per set are 13.4, down one from last season — it’s worked so far to the tune of another league title, an achievement Elliott will never take for granted.

“It’s something I worry about every single night,” he said. “All the fans and the media think that we just have it rolling, but it’s really hard to keep the level of program that we have. We have good quality people in our program, but it doesn’t take much to see a program unwind.”

A fighter turned champion

In O’Neal, he has not only a proven winner whose credentials announce her presence well before she walks into a room, but also a great example of what a college athlete should aspire to be.

The owner of a bachelor's in corporate communications and a master's of education in sports management, she's much more than an affable young woman playing a sport.

One of the more intelligent, deeper thinkers among athletes on campus — dad Jermaine said in an ESPN interview that she was walking and taking by 8 months old —  O’Neal knows there is more to life than athletics, and she has been active in several areas, including creating a Blacks Lives Matter video campaign with teammates after George Floyd was killed by Minneapolis police back in 2020.

While volleyball continues to be her passion — she made her debut with the USA senior national team  over the summer in the Volleyball Nations League — college isn’t forever, even if it feels that way after six years on campus. With that in mind, O’Neal is taking time to smell those hardwood roses.

“This year, I’ve been very reflective on everything,” she said. “I know it’s my last year, and so I’m just really trying to be in the moment with everything and just think about all that’s happened since I’ve been here. Obviously, it hasn’t been an easy journey for me, with our program having some highs and lows.”

The highs and lows weren’t all about volleyball. O’Neal’s well-chronicled fight to play the sport she loves despite a heart valve condition that led to open-heart surgery at age 12 and another one in 2020 has made her one of the most inspirational athletes in any sport. The recipient of the 2021 Honda Inspiration Award is a living testament to the indomitable human spirit and good old-fashioned toughness that has typified her career.

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Defending the crown

At 24, she has gone through more than some do in a lifetime. It’s a large reason she makes sure to show appreciation to her coaches and teammates for their work in keeping this train moving, they hope toward another natty.

For now, she’s keeping her focus on Saturday’s opponent, UCF, before she plays her final regular-season home game against Texas Tech two days after Thanksgiving.

“We try to stay really present and try to focus on the game that’s ahead of us,” she said. “It’s so much easier to just focus on the now rather than getting too antsy worrying about what’s coming two or three weeks down the road.”

She’s a fighter turned champion who has been here before. She knows what it takes to win in volleyball and in life.

The program won’t see another like Asjia O’Neal.

This article originally appeared on Austin American-Statesman: Golden: Horns' volleyball star Asjia O'Neal is testament to resilience