Midway through her freshman season at Oregon State, Kyla Waiters locked herself in the bathroom, and a concerned teacher’s assistant called 911. “I just thought I didn’t want to live anymore,” Waiters said.
Her decision a few months earlier to accept a scholarship to play volleyball for coach Mark Barnard’s team had been seeded with promises and hope. Named to a high school All-American team and attracting interest from a handful of Division I schools, Waiters said Barnard and his staff had promised to teach her a new position, give her a redshirt year to learn it, then potentially build a winning team around her.