A year removed from collecting every All-America and All-Conference award and being featured in Volleyball Magazine in 2004, Carlos Moreno, the setter of the BYU men's volleyball team, is setting his sights on even greater heights.
"We won last year and I'm not expecting anything less," Moreno said, a 6-4, 185 pound senior from Sao Paulo, Brazil. ""We are going to have a pretty good team, if not better, so we are going to win the national championship again, back-to-back."
Moreno came to BYU from Brazil in January 2002 as an unknown setter. Despite missing out on all of the team's fall practices, Moreno found his way into the starting lineup early in the season and quickly won the favor of Cougar coaches, fans, and BYU coeds with his excellent play and hustle, and good looks (at least that's why the coeds like him). He helped the Cougars finish the season with a 23-7 record, good for a third place finish in the AVCA rankings.
Things only got better for the Brazilian in 2003 as the Cougars finished tied for second in the Mountain Pacific Sports Federation. For his efforts, he earned second-team All-MPSF and All-America honors. He also helped BYU win the post-season conference tournament by defeating rival Pepperdine in a five-game thriller. With the win, the Cougars secured an automatic bid to the NCAA tournament. After disposing of Penn State in four games, the Cougars were set to take on the Lewis University Flyers, a team they were heavily favored to beat.
The Flyers came out fighting, taking the Cougars the distance in the first game, which BYU won 44-42. Lewis played with much more intensity and won the next two games. While the Cougars took the fourth, the Flyers made more plays than BYU in the fifth game and took the match, ending BYU's national championship hopes.
Moreno was devastated after the defeat.
"It was one of the worst feelings of my life," Moreno said of the national championship defeat. "It's one thing that I am going to remember for the rest of my life."
Moreno said that sometimes in life he would like to have a time machine to be able to go back in time and fix things. While he may never be able to travel through time, he was given the chance to fix the 2003 loss by returning to the NCAA Final Four in 2004.
After avenging the 2003 championship loss with a win over Lewis in the semifinals, the Cougars were set to play the Long Beach State 49ers for the fourth time that season. BYU had been victorious in the previous three, all close matches. The Cougars started out rough, losing 15-30 in the first game. They rebounded and won two of the next three, sending the match to a fifth game. Down 10-6 in the fifth game, Moreno started to worry.
"I said to myself 'not again, it's not happening again,'" Moreno said.
But he did not let himself nor his teammates give up.
"I kept pushing the guys and myself," he said. "It was a second chance that I couldn't let pass by. I had to grab it."
Moreno and the Cougars did not give up and fought back from the 10-6 deficit and saved two Long Beach championship points to win the game 19-17 and take the national championship. How sweet it was for Moreno and the Cougars. Redemption was theirs.
"Winning the championship was one of the best feelings," Moreno said. "It washed my soul. I felt accomplished and I thanked the Lord who helped me so much. It was an amazing feeling. Everything was beautiful and good after that."
Winning national championships is what Moreno is all about. Individual honors are secondary. In 2004, Moreno won every award imaginable, AVCA National Player of the Year, Final Four MVP, First-Team All-American, MPSF Player of the Year, First-Team All-MPSF ... and the list goes on. While he appreciates these awards, the award he enjoys the most is the national championship.
"I think the major award is the national championship, winning with my teammates," Moreno said. "If I won all these awards and we didn't win the national championship, it would've been just pointless."
Teamwork is a very important aspect for Carlos Moreno. He understands that he needs his teammates, and they need him.
"They are the ones that helped me get the awards," he said. "I can't just pass, set to myself, and spike. They are the ones that get me the passes and hit the ball. They help me get better."
He does, however, understand why he got the awards. Moreno knows he has worked hard for everything he has earned.
"The awards are a good reward, they show that I've been working hard for so long," he said. "I've sacrificed a lot and done extra work. I'm the first to get to practice and the last one to leave."
Moreno's sense of hard work goes beyond volleyball. Along with studying advertising marketing and practicing with the team everyday, Moreno works nights as a custodian in the Smith Fieldhouse, even during the season. How does he do it? Sometimes he asks himself the same question, but he said that it is all about having priorities.
"I try to be organized. Everything goes crazy during the season but I try to get a lot of rest and make time for everything, studying, classes, practice, and work. Sometimes I just go crazy but somehow I make it through."
Moreno learned about hard work and volleyball from his family. His father Antonio Moreno played for the Brazilian national team in four Olympic games. Carlos said he had a volleyball coach 24 hours a day from when he was 10, he had a coach at club practice and a coach at home, his father. So much volleyball might burn some out, but not Carlos. Natural ability and his father's kind way of pushing him made volleyball fun.
"When you find something you are good at and that comes naturally, you like it," he said. "It just came so easy to me and I started getting good at it and my whole family played. I played a lot with my dad but he didn't force me to play. He pushed me the right way."
Family has always been important to Carlos. He is the oldest of six children, four boys and two girls. Everyone in the family plays volleyball, but his little brother excels at tennis. He hopes that all of his younger siblings will follow in his footsteps and go on to college.
It was actually Carlos' twin sister, Anna Laura, who played volleyball at Oral Roberts University, that got him interested in coming to the USA to play collegiate volleyball.
"She told me about NCAA college volleyball in the US, how great it was," he said. "She told me about the great facilities and that they let you study and play volleyball at the same time. In Brazil, I would have to choose between school and volleyball."
So he came. And while success has seemed to come easy for the volleyball star, it wasn't so easy at first. Everything here was different for Carlos and the language barrier was the least of his problems. Brazil has a warm climate and Moreno had never seen snow before coming to Provo. The BYU environment was also new. In Brazil, Carlos sported long hair and was used to wearing tank tops to school.
He was not alone in his new world, however. Other teammates had experienced the same when coming here and he met many students that spoke Portuguese that helped him. One of his biggest supports is Maria Zanandrea, an associate professor of exercise science at BYU, and her family. They are from Brazil as well and made him a part of their family.
"Everything about this culture is very different than where he is from and it was difficult for him at first to adjust," Zanandrea said. "But I think that he has done really well and adjusted. He is very bright."
"She helps me a lot," Moreno said. "I love her and her family. They are great."
BYU volleyball fans may also be familiar with the Zanandrea clan. Every home match they sit in the Smith Fieldhouse bleachers with a large Brazilian flag cheering on the team and their compatriots. They have been attending the team's matches since it was a club in the 1980's.
There is volleyball, school, and work. What else is there to Carlos Moreno? He considers himself a pretty good windsurfer since picking up the sport at age 14, although he has not had the opportunity to practice the sport since coming to Utah. Going along with the extreme theme, Moreno is a big fan of bungee jumping and has been so many times that he has lost count. Skydiving is the next sport that he would like to give a shot.
While the future looks bright for the Brazilian star, there is one thing Zanandrea would like everyone to know about Carlos Moreno. It's that he got to where he is because of the effort he puts forth and everything he has accomplished is a result of hard work.