Jake Zina has a superpower. Mascenic’s senior volleyball star doesn’t have the ability to leap tall buildings or travel faster than a speeding bullet. What he does have is boundless energy in a sport that’s won and lost by momentum.
“Volleyball is all about energy,” said Vikings’ head coach Tommy Milbert. “More often than not, if you have evenly balanced teams, the team with more energy is going to win.”
Zina, a polished setter and a team captain in his senior season, has always had the energy. The ability to channel it, however, is another story. As a child, he was diagnosed with a severe case of ADHD.
“He would climb walls, scale trees,” said Jake’s mom Kristy. “When he was ten months old, he climbed out of the crib and down the stairs, and that’s when we say that it started.”
Zina was officially diagnosed at four years old, much earlier than most ADHD diagnoses, and saw a specialist for most of his childhood.
It swirled to the forefront as he moved through the school system. In class, his mind would wander.
“The teacher would be talking and I’d try to focus, but I’d just go off and think about something else,” Zina said. “I like hunting and fishing, so I’m always thinking about that. Sports, what I’m going to do throughout the day or when I get home. Anything that piques my interest.”
Get him out of math class and into a more boisterous situation, and that energy started bubbling out, no longer trapped in his own head. Anything was possible, though not always for the better.
Left alone in gym class at Boynton Middle School, he’d leap from the bleachers to the basketball stanchion, flip, and land in a heap, his arm nearly broken.
“He would just run around and say stupid things,” said his senior teammate Nate Long. “He was always really funny though.”
Boynton science teacher Kelly Stacy saw potential in the sometimes-disruptive middle-schooler. Stacy said she likely had ADHD as well, but when she was growing up, it was not really on the radar. Diagnosed or not, her own experience made it easy to deal with a rambunctious kid like Jake.
“I always had an easy time dealing with kids that were really energetic,” Stacy said. “I always just thought of them as me. He was infectious, he had energy, but when you work within that and channel it, he was a great kid to have in class.”
The science classroom was a good fit for Zina, with hands-on experiments outweighing the math problems and formulas that would send him back into his own head. Outside of the classroom, Zina would play soccer, basketball and baseball, but even those sports weren’t enough to hold his focus.
“Baseball is such a slow sport,” Zina said. “The only way I’d focus is if I was pitching or up to bat. You stick me out in the outfield, and I’d be off thinking about something else, until I’d hear the crack of the bat and I’d have to go chase down the ball in the air.”
For as long as he could remember, Zina took prescription medication to keep his energy in check.
“The medicine helped a lot,” he said. “I thought it worked really well.”
But it wasn’t until he got to high school at Mascenic that he found the secret to channeling his power: volleyball. He attended an open-gym tryout and within that hour, he was hooked.
“I went up in hitting lines, tossed the ball in the air, and smacked it, and was like ‘Oh, that feels good,’” Zina said.
Milbert, then the JV coach, and Lauren Somero, Mascenic’s head coach in Zina’s sophomore and junior years, knew they had a potential volleyball star on their hands, if they could find a way to rein him in.
“His distractions would take over in practice,” Somero said. “He’s goofy, he’s great to be around, but it wasn’t always conducive to the practice environment.”
“You could tell he definitely had some attention issues,” Milbert said. “He was tough to reel in. Even coaching him his freshman year, he was tough to wrangle. I was snapping at him constantly – ‘Jake, pay attention. Jake, pay attention. Jake, pay attention.’ No matter what you’re talking about.”
Somero and Milbert came up with plans to keep their young setter engaged.
“Structure and discipline became the name of the game for him,” Somero said. “There couldn’t be downtime because that’s when he would get distracted.”
Fortunately for the Vikings, Zina was “obsessed with being the best,” Somero said. And fortunately for Zina, he quickly found that the nature of volleyball – a flurry of activity, a chance to think and reset, and another flurry – was attuned to his particular mindset.
“Every play is new,” Zina said. “It doesn’t get old. There’s always something different, and the game goes so fast. Anything can happen in volleyball, that’s why I like it. Diving on the floor, passing balls, spiking – it’s the perfect sport. You have time to think and rest while still playing, and then it’s on your side and you play for a short spurt.”
Like any comic book hero with super powers, it took some time for Zina to acclimate to them, but once he did, it was good news for the Vikings. Zina spent a couple years setting up All-State hitter Micah Howard as Mascenic made playoff appearance after playoff appearance; he spent his senior year assisting Long and Zach Totaro at the net and helping the Vikings to one more postseason berth.
Along the way, he began to mature. After his sophomore season, Zina had a talk with his grandmother, Patty Wallace, another ADHD sufferer from a generation before medication, and she gave him advice he took to heart.
“My nana had ADHD, but there wasn’t medicine for it, so she had to find other ways to cope with it,” Zina said. “She helped me a lot with that too. She said ‘One day, you’re not going to be able to take it, you’ll have to find other ways to deal with it.’”
As a means of becoming more independent, of growing up, Zina chose to stop taking his ADHD medicine and instead began adding tools to help him focus in other ways. Of those tools, none are more effective than volleyball. Off the court, Zina knows he needs to keep his grades up in order to remain eligible. And on the court?
“Obviously his talent speaks for itself,” Milbert said. “But we had to make him more of a leader. He was always a team player, he always cared about winning, but he wasn’t one to get the team riled up. He was more like in his own head, riling himself up. This year, he’s the one clapping in people’s faces, getting them amped up. It’s awesome to see.”
“One thing he always had going for him is he’s got the fire,” Somero said. “He’s always fired up. But he became a leader in the stability sense, which is the opposite of that fire. Staying focused because you’re disciplined, not because you’re fired up – that goes against everything that is natural for him. He is focused and disciplined and it’s really, really cool.”
On Friday, the Vikings take the court for what may be the final game of Zina’s Mascenic career, a road trip to Keene for the opening round of the playoffs. Whether the underdog Vikes pull off the upset or not, Zina’s newfound laser-focus should serve him well, in volleyball and in life.
“He’s going to go far,” Stacy said. “I know he’s going to go far, because he’s got the drive, he’s got the energy, he’s got all the pieces, it’s just a matter of finding the way to use that energy to benefit you. It’s essentially a gift if you can learn to channel that energy. Most people don’t have this kind of energy, the ability to be in a high-energy situation. If you can channel that energy, keep going, do 12 things at once and keep going for a 14-hour day, that’s going to serve you well in the future.”