By Brittany Bowyer
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PHOENIX — TCU Volleyball star junior Evan Hendrix has been anxiously awaiting this weekend’s game for weeks. As an Arizona native, she’s been looking forward to making her return to State 48, and this weekend, the Horned Frogs play ASU on the road in conference play.

“Honestly, I’m super grateful that I get to be in a conference where I get to travel home and see my family,” Hendrix said. “I have my entire mom’s side in Arizona, so I’m just excited to see them. You’ll probably see them at the game, they’re very loud. So I’m excited to be back in the stomping grounds.”

Hendrix is a 2024 graduate of Notre Dame Prep, where she helped lead the Saints to a State Championship in her sophomore season. She says her time as a Saint helped to shape the player and person she is today.

“I think that Notre Dame, the four R’s that we lived by, I think that was really shown in the school and in how everyone treated each other,” Hendrix said. “Just being surrounded by love, and there’s a lot of people from my high school that go to TCU, so I get to see a lot of familiar faces all the time, which is nice. Just being able to keep those connections. It wasn’t an easy school, too, so I think I learned a lot of resilience and just pushing through adversity, but yeah. I loved my time at Notre Dame.”

However, her volleyball story began years before high school, as she started playing as a kid with her dad.

“I just remember the first time I started playing volleyball I kinda was like, ‘Hmmm. I don’t really know if this is the sport for me,’” Hendrix said. “Then I just remember peppering with my dad back and forth in the driveway, and I don’t know, I fell in love with it. I’m really close with both of my parents, but being able to do that with my dad was super special.”

Hendrix participated in a lot of recreational volleyball as a kid, and her dad was even the coach of one of her teams. Eventually, she went on to start club volleyball, where she realized her true potential for the sport.

TCU Head Coach Jason Williams says he still remembers the first time he saw her play. It was at a tournament, and she was playing up for her age.

“The very, very first thing I thought about when I saw her was, ‘She can help us win,’” Williams said. “It was early in my TCU career, like maybe year one, and I was just like she for sure can help us win in whatever role that she has.”

He said as he continued to watch Hendrix play, he got to learn about what she excelled at and where she still had some room for improvement.

“I just knew she was going to be a good fit,” Williams said. “The things she did not do well in juniors, I knew she would do well in our system.”

After receiving a slew of college scholarship offers, Hendrix decided on TCU, which she says has a very similar feel to Notre Dame Prep.

“TCU is very similar to Notre Dame in the sense that it’s a smaller campus with a bigger school feel,” Hendrix said.

Hendrix says at TCU, she’s able to get to know all of her professors personally and build relationships with them. They’re aware of her commitments as a student-athlete and work with her to ensure she’s able to stay on top of everything.

At Notre Dame Prep, she also had a rigorous academic workload, which made the transition to college easier for her to manage as it was something she was already used to doing.

On the court, the biggest transition Hendrix had to make between high school and college involved her power. Williams said when they recruited Hendrix, they questioned if she’d have the power necessary to put the ball away in the Big 12.

“In our gym, we crush balls, so we really hit balls hard and that was an adjustment for her,” Williams said. “She came from high school and club where she could be a little more finesse, where for us to have the success that we’re having I needed her to unleash a little bit more.”

Williams said she spent her freshman year adjusting, but by the time her sophomore season rolled around, she was ready. She finished the 2025 season as an All-American with 543 kills on the year, good for the second-most in the Big 12.

On the court, what sets her apart from others is what Williams calls her ability to “hang and bang.”

“She’s a high flyer, even though she’s small, her ability to jump and hang in the air is just able to separate things that she can do that other people just can’t do,” Williams said. “I’d say the ability to just kind of jump and elevate, and her speed helps her being able to work within the speed of our program. It gives her an advantage over others.”

When asked about what she means to the team, Williams made it sound as if Hendrix is the team’s rock; she’s someone solid they can always lean on inside and outside of the gym who carries an enormous amount of the physical workload. He said he’s trying to get her to pour into her teammates a little bit more, so she doesn’t feel like she’s got to carry the load herself.

Williams believes when you’re doing things like that, the individual accolades will follow.

For the remainder of the season, Hendrix said she’s looking to take things day by day and work on being present in each moment as they come. She also said she wants people to see the joy she brings to the team and how happy she is to be there. She also wouldn’t mind if she happened to be an All-American once again.

Brittany Bowyer is a Report for America corps member, covering sports for Independent Newsmedia in Arizona. Report for America places talented journalists in local newsrooms to report on under-covered issues and regions.