Almost 12 years ago, the now 6-foot-4BYU senior volleyball player,Brenden Sander was sitting on the bench at the junior national’s volleyball tournament.
At just 10 years old, Brenden was playing up four years on his older brother Taylor’s club team.
“He joined Taylor’s team because our family was going to the tournament anyway,” Kera Sander, Brenden’s mother said. “Brenden was just expecting to put a jersey on and not do anything.”
But, that didn’t end up being the case.
“A player on the opposite team, Jeremy Dejno, who ended up playing at UC Irvine and was an amazing player, just started serving Taylor’s team off the court, including Taylor,” Kera said.
With no timeouts left, Taylor and Brenden’s coach really only had one option to slow down the other team’s momentum.
“Jeremy was just bombing servers and just acing us,” Brenden said. “Then my coach calls my name, and I thought ‘I’m not going in there. This guy serves way too hard for me.’”
However, Brenden stood up and went into the game. With Brenden being the smallest kid on the court,Dejno served the ball right to him.
“I passed the ball perfectly, we sided-out and won the game,” Brenden said. “I started crying. I was so little, I didn’t know what to expect.”
A native of Huntington Beach, California, Sander might be known to many as “Taylor Sander’s little brother,” but that is not the whole story. At the end of his sophomore year, Brenden was named to the All-Mountain Pacific Sports Federation Tournament Team, named to the All-MPSF First Team and received American Volleyball Coaches Association First Team All-America honors. He went on to end his junior season with 254 kills and 90 digs, was awarded AVCA Honorable Mention All-American accolades and received Second Team All-Mountain Pacific Sports Federation honors. In all reality, Brenden has made a name for himself.
When Brenden was six-years-old he started to look for a club team to play with. However, at that time, there weren’t any teams for his age group. Brenden’s only option was to play up four years, on his older brother Taylor’s team.
Taylor, who played for BYU from 2011-2014 and was named the 2014 AVCA Player of the Year, started to shine when he was about 15 years old. On the other hand, Brenden was a standout at a younger age because he had learned good fundaments from simply playing with his older brother in the backyard.
“I think Taylor was kind of a standout because the sport was fairly new,” Kera said. “By the time that Brenden came around four years later, he was just as good as Taylor but the competition had grown with him.”
After playing together at a young age, most people notice that Taylor and Brenden’s volleyball games are very similar. In fact, sometimes it is hard to tell the difference between the two of them.
“They are just so fluid,” Kera said. “Brenden will hit something out of the back row and we will just sit there and say ‘Oh, my gosh, that looked exactly like Taylor.”
But, there are differences between the two of them. According to their mom, Brenden has better passing abilities, evident in that Junior National’s game 12 years ago, and better ball control.
When it came to the time for Brenden to make a decision about where he wanted to go for college it was really a no-brainer. While he was recruited by other big schools, including UCLA, USC and Stanford, Brenden wanted to experience a packed Smith Fieldhouse at BYU.
“The atmosphere in the Fieldhouse is amazing,” Brenden said. “I just didn’t get that feeling anywhere else.”
For Brenden, he thrives on the home-court advantage the Smith Fieldhouse brings. In 2016, with a completely packed Smithfield House, BYU took down No. 5 UC Santa Barbara in a five-set thrillerduring the semi-finals of the Mountain Pacific Sports Federation tournament.
“The Fieldhouse was literally packed all the way back,” Brenden said. “To the point where people couldn’t even see the game. It was absolutely insane and probably one of my favorite memories at BYU.”
Although Huntington Beach is home for the rest of the Sander family, they are present at every game and have been since Taylor started playing at BYU.
After Kera’s parents finished serving a mission for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Murray, Utah, Kera and her husband, Steve, convinced her parents to buy a house with them in Provo.
“We would save our money and eat cheerios so we could fly up and see the boys play,” Kera said.
With similar abilities in volleyball, Brenden believes that Taylor has started to pave the way for him. However, that might not be entirely the case.
“I think that being “Taylor Sander’s little brother,” is just a side note that people can attach to Brenden, but he would be doing phenomenal if he wasn’t Taylor’s little brother,” Kera said. “Brenden has realized that some things have come because he is the little brother of Taylor Sander. But, we keep reminding Brenden that there are a lot of little brothers out there and not all of them get invited to do these opportunities. The work he has put in is paying off.”
One of those opportunities came this past summer. Brenden was able to train with USA Volleyball, alongside his brother and other former BYU volleyball players. While he wasn’t getting paid, traveling or competing with the team, Brenden realized that it was just as helpful to get his foot in the door for years to come.
Regardless of the label people place on Brenden, he has turned into an important part of the BYU volleyball team.
“Every team has players that express leadership in different ways,” BYU head coach Shawn Olmstead said. “There are guys that are vocal and energetic and then there are guys that just go, do and take on the leadership naturally. That is what Brenden has. He knows that younger players look to him in key moments and he is able to be a leader through example and be dependable when you need him.”
For his senior season, Brenden has his eyes set on the National Championship title.
“We’ve been fortunate enough to get to the championship two years in a row, but we just haven’t been able to finish that last game,” Brenden said. “We have way too many runner-up banners in the Fieldhouse, we need the National Championship banner back.”
As his coach, Olmstead wants to do whatever he can to help him achieve that dream.
“He’s been so close a handful of times to winning that National Championship,” Olmstead said. “He is someone that works year-round and has spent a ton of time in the off-season getting ready for it. I hope that I can help him and be a mentor so that whatever he wants to get out of his whole experience at BYU, he can get it.”
While Brenden still has his mind-set on this year and winning the National Championship with BYU, in the back of his mind he’s got another goal.
Brenden and his family had the opportunity to travel to Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, for the 2016 Olympic games. There they watched Taylor and Team USA win a bronze medal in indoor volleyball. Watching his brother experience the Olympics ignited a spark in Brenden.
After his senior season with BYU, Brenden hopes to sign with an agent to play overseas, but ultimately his eyes are set on something else.
The 2020 Olympics in Tokyo.