Yadhira Anchante blamed her hands.

They were the culprit. The reason she wouldn’t be allowed to hit. Why she needed to hone in on finesse and precision over brute force and raw power. The pretext for her focus on finger over arm strength.

It was 2013, and 10-year-old Anchante had been formally playing volleyball for one year, a time she spent learning it all. She played every position and wholly immersed herself in every aspect of the game.

But now it was time for her to be given a set position.

Anchante wanted the same as every other kid — to become a hitter. She wasn’t so lucky, instead being designated a setter. Not by choice, but obligation.

“They just chose five people, but none of us wanted to be a setter, because in the moment, you’re like, ‘Oh, I want to be a hitter!’ With the scoring and all that,” Anchante said. “But then they saw I have really good hands, and they chose me.”

Luckily, it didn’t take long for her to get over any disappointment she felt. After one year playing setter full time, Anchante started to appreciate what it meant, what she could do.

“Being the setter is being the mind of the game. You have basically the power of the game. You control the game,” she said. “You’re the most important position, I think, on the court because you have to think about the plays and give confidence to your players. And create that connection with all of them.”

Anchante decides which attacker is going to get the ball, with what kind of set and at what tempo, all while reading the opposing teams’ defense and remaining the Golden Eagles’ imperturbable force.

She — and her hands — control it all.

Every day of Anchante’s formative years looked the same.

Wake up, drive 40 minutes to the training facility, practice, rest, practice again, drive 40 minutes home.

“It was a long day,” she said. “I got used to it. I’ve been doing that since I’m a child, 9-10 (years old). All my life.”

After high school, Anchante started playing with the Peruvian national team, something she still does in the offseason. Then, at 19 years old, she moved to the United States to play JUCO at Iowa Western Community College.

The first thing she noticed about playing in America was the change in coaching styles. In Peru, mistakes were not allowed. Coaches would chastise any error, no matter how big or small. In the US, the player-coach dynamic operates a little different.

“[US coaches] give you more confidence. If you make a mistake, they say, ‘Okay, move on, and you don’t have to worry about that one.’ So I feel like in Iowa, I learned that mistakes are okay, and everyone makes them. And then here I thought like that,” Anchante said.

“And I feel like everyone is so positive here. They don’t think about mistakes a lot, they’re moving on all the time. And that’s helped me.”

In the United States, it’s the carrot. In Peru, it’s the stick.

The difference allowed Anchante to blossom. In her two years at Iowa Western, she became a two-time National Junior College Athletic Association player of the year. Then in her first season at Marquette, in 2022, she was named the Big East setter of the year.

Her mind was no longer racing, stuck thinking about what happens if something goes awry. Instead, she was just doing her thing, letting the game come to her and using her talent to her advantage.

“They gave me some freedom,” Anchante said, “and that helped me to grow as a player.”

It’s the first set of the first match of Anchante’s final year at Marquette, and the No. 24 Golden Eagles are in Charleston, Illinois facing the Eastern Illinois Panthers.

Marquette has an early 6-2 lead and Eastern Illinois mishandles the serve, bumping the ball over the net directly to Anchante. She sees the ball floating toward her, her eyes only following its path. In one smooth motion, Anchante cocks her arm back and swings fully through the ball, resulting in a kill.

The next set, Anchante receives a bump from libero Molly Berezowitz. She has outside hitter Jenna Reitsma to her left, middle blocker Hattie Bray to her right and outside hitter Aubrey Hamilton behind her — all of them good options to receive the set. Instead, Anchante dumps the ball over the net, catching the Panthers’ defense by surprise and extending the Golden Eagles’ 4-0 run.

Fast forward a few points, it’s an identical situation. This time, Anchante puts the ball 15 feet straight up and Hamilton blitzes to just behind the 10-foot line, plants her feet and uncorks an unstoppable kill to give Marquette a 9-1 advantage.

Despite being a small sample size, the sequence is a microcosm of what she does best — keep the defense guessing.

“Yadhi’s ability to create stress on the defense is what separates her from most people,” Marquette head coach Ryan Theis said.

And when it’s time to make the set, regardless of who it’s directed to, it’s second nature for her. An afterthought. What some might call intuition. She can rattle off where each of her hitters need their sets and go out on the court and place them perfectly every single time. No hesitation, no mistakes.

She sees Bray, she sets it fast and outside. She sees Reitsma, she sets it fast again. Hamilton wants the ball both high and fast, so that’s what Anchante does. Middle blocker Carsen Murray also wants it high, so Anchante puts it high. You ask, she’ll deliver.

“All of them have different styles of playing,” Anchante said. “But since I’ve been playing with them for already two years and a half, just getting to know them on the court, I know how to set and how they’re gonna bring the points for us.

“And that’s amazing because I trust them, they trust me.”

It doesn’t matter who the hitter is, Anchante will get the ball to them in the right place at the correct tempo — almost as if each of her sets should come with wrapping paper around it and a little bow on top.

“I don’t know how setters do it to be honest,” Murray said. “It’s just something that we kind of built that connection. You start to learn people’s tendencies.

“It’s the same thing for me, when I see her set. Like if she’s tight sometimes, I can tell when she’s about to dump it (over the net against an unaware defense) versus when she’s going to try and set like a sneak set to like one of the middles for an easy kill.”

It wasn’t always as seamless a process as it is now, though. This wizardry is a product of countless reps in the gym and painstaking hours spent setting to each of her hitters.

Her practices follow the same kind of pattern everyday — a one-on-one session with former setter and assistant coach Abby Gilleland followed by team-wide drills.

First comes the setting targets — which look like basketball hoops — and Anchante will try to the ball into the target from multiple locations. Then she’ll start working with actual basketballs because their added weight make volleyballs “feel like a balloon.”

When it comes time to start the team drills, Anchante will work with each of her hitters to simulate in-game situations, sometimes setting the ball nonstop for as long as seven minutes to improve consistency. Being a setter means repetition till it’s rote, being Anchante means taking it another step further.

“I can always count on her in the most chaotic of situations to put up a good ball to me,” Reitsma said. “And I think it’s the comfortable feeling that we have together, of, I know that she’ll put me in great situations, and she knows just, how to get me a really good quality ball, and that allows me to help the team get some points.”

Anchante cannot hide the smile that proudly radiates across her face when she talks about the prospects of a professional career.

The mere utterance of “pro” elicits a beam glistening with such wattage and depth that when she hears it, it seems as though all she can think about is the 11-year journey it took for the word to carry real weight. The daily 80-minute roundtrip drives to and from practice. Leaving her home and country behind to chase her dreams. Spending an impossible amount of time stressing her mind and body to the maximum to perfect her craft.

She cannot dim her grin’s illumination. She doesn’t know how to, and she doesn’t want to learn.

Turning professional has always been on Anchante’s radar. Long before she was in the United States, she knew she wanted to make volleyball her life.

“I really like volleyball,” she said with a sheepish laugh, as if it wasn’t already obvious.

Naturally then, this year, her final one at Marquette, carries extra weight. Not just because her presence on the court is no small part of why the Golden Eagles have won three-straight Big East regular season titles, hosted the opening round of the NCAA tournament and went to the Sweet 16 for the second time in program history.

But, perhaps more importantly, it’s also her last chance to fulfill her goal of achieving what no previous Golden Eagles have — winning the Big East tournament and making the Elite Eight — and the final opportunity for her to impress teams with her abilities.

“We just need to win some big games,” Anchante said. “I feel like our [non-conference] is a really good time to show ourselves and people to watch us. We play (No. 5) Stanford, we play (No. 3) Pittsburgh. Really big teams.”

After that’s done, she’s leaving Milwaukee to check off something that’s been on her bucket list for as long as the bucket list has existed.

It’s all thanks to those hands.

This article was written by Jack Albright. He can be reached at [email protected] or on Twitter/X @JackAlbrightMU.