Toporcer has head start to college career

March 27, 2017 at 12:05a.m.

Volleyball star skips freshman year

Josie Toporcer is going to college with a head start.

When the Lordstown volleyball player arrives at Westminster this fall, she’ll do so with 40 college credits to her name, making her a sophomore when most of her peers start out as freshman. She picked up her credits at Kent State.

She’s been managing college and high school workload while playing varsity sports.

“It’s difficult, papers come at you much faster than they do in high school, but I find the time. Sometimes I have to stay up most of the night,” Toporcer said. “You just have to get the work done and sometimes you can’t go out on the weekends to do that.”

Toporcer has excelled under pressure on and off the court, carrying a 4.0 grad-point average and finishing out a volleyball career where she owns four school records: digs in a season, game and career and is the school’s leader in service points.

“It’s kind of funny to see. When I was younger, I would look at the scoreboards and leaderboards and thought ‘that would be cool to have my name up there,”’ Toporcer said. “Now it’s on there four times.

“It’s not just me here, I have an amazing support system here at home and coaches and I’m as good as I am because of the people behind me,” she added.

Despite her advanced academic repertoire, she approaches her teammates and classmates on equal footing. She found balance between leading the volleyball team with an iron fist while not being a pushover.

“I think I’ve found a happy medium. I know how to lead a crowd the right way, with respect and without making them feel small,” Toporcer said. “It works pretty well and I’ve been able to make friends regardless of their age level because of the respect level we have.”

College classes have been a challenging and humbling experience for Toporcer. She was the youngest student in the classroom and has befriended some students on the opposite end of the age spectrum, the students considered too old to be regular undergrads. Some of the friends she’s made there a 60-year-old physics teacher she met in her Spanish class.

“I’m called the baby in all my college classes. I know how it feels to be talked down to,” Toporcer said. “I played varsity volleyball in freshman year and I had leaders that can talk down to you and make you feel small and I don’t want to do that to anyone.

“My reaction is ‘look at the grades, I have a higher score than you,’ so it’s fine. Mostly it’s just a joke.”

Toporcer will major in occupational therapy and minor in Spanish at Westminster, which she’ll attend for two years before transferring to Duquesne to finish out her studies.

“I could not ask for anything more from Lordstown,” Toporcer said. “The team, the coach, everything were so supportive and I couldn’t ask for anything more.”