The workouts of University of Utah football members are fairly well-known for one Bingham High volleyball player.
That’s because, to varying degrees, Seleisa Elisaia does the same routine.
Elisaia’s father is Doug Elisaia, who is in his 11th season as the strength and conditioning coach for the Utes.
“Most of the stuff he gives to us is what he gives to his players,” said Seleisa Elisaia, who has two sisters and one brother. “He doesn’t hold back at all with us.”
But if you think that this kind of regimen might be the source of some resentment, think again.
“He’s most of the reason I’m where I’m at,” she said. “He’s pressuring me and my siblings to better each other to get physically ready to get on the court.”
Seleisa is the senior leader for the Bingham Miners, the team that seems to have the best shot at displacing either Lone Peak or Pleasant Grove, the top two teams in Class 6A, at some point this season.
It hasn’t happened so far, but Seleisa Elisaia is serving a dual role in pushing the Miners closer to that mark.
She is in a two-setter rotation for Bingham as she delivers passes to teammates for kill shots.
When on the front row, however, the left-handed Elisaia is too valuable as a hitter to continue to set. So she sets up shop on the right side, serving as the primary hitting threat for the team. It’s an unusual circumstance for most high school teams.
Elisaia has committed to play at Cal State Bakersfield, and her next school is planning to use the athletic, 5-foot-11 player only as a setter.
“We’ll see about that,” Bingham coach Melissa Glasker said.
(Trent Nelson | The Salt Lake Tribune) Bingham's Seleisa Elisaia (10) as North Summit hosts Bingham, high school girls' volleyball in Coalville, Thursday August 17, 2017.
Elisaia’s shots have become noticeably more powerful in the past year. She’s averaging better than 10 kills per match.
“We preach a lot on our team that there’s four different roles: You’ve got to have a stud, you have to have a stabilizer, you have to have someone who’s the leader,” Glasker said. “You have to have these key roles and not necessarily does one person fit into all those roles.
“She’s, for sure, our stud. She does it with her play.”
Seleisa’s older sister Safua is a junior volleyball player for the Academy of Art in San Francisco, while brother Samuelu Elisaia is a redshirt freshman on the Snow College football team.
So that left Seleisa and younger sister Colleen to carry on dad’s workouts in between school terms.
“In the summer, he was pretty strict on us because we weren’t doing much,” Seleisa Elisaia said. “Whenever we didn’t get our workout done, he’d say, ‘Well, you can’t go anywhere.’”
The home workouts were on the honor system though because dad was busy up on the hill.
“We just kind of learned to do it ourselves,” she said. “We’ve done that [lied about working out] once, I’m not going to lie. Sorry, dad. But we’re pretty on top of that with him.”
