Resilient Nicholls setter Battistella natural leader for young volleyball squad

If you ever run into a super hero who goes by the moniker of something like Miss Resilience or Captain Resilience, you can be assured her alter ego is named Kendall Battistella.

By day, she is a mild-mannered college Pre-med student.

By night, she is an unlikely 5-foot-2 hero among giants, her costume a Nicholls volleyball uniform sporting a number 7 jersey.

“I think my superpower is resilience – I’ll never give up,” said Battistella. “I can be undersized and not the fastest or stuff like that, but you will never see me give up. I will keep going and going and going until I am successful.”

Battistella made herself successful from an early age, starting on the Pope John Paul II volleyball team as an eighth grader and leading her team to three state championships.

“I grew up as a DS (defensive specialist) and libero (a player on an indoor volleyball team who serves as a defensive specialist and is not allowed to rotate to the front line), and a setter,” said Battistella. “I would do everything. I was set in club (volleyball). I would set in high school. I would play libero in club and different stuff like that. I was always on the go doing both things, trying to get reps in at both positions. I’ve always been kind of a team player. Whatever the team needs me to do, I’ll do.

“Being an undersized setter can sometimes be challenging but I take it to my advantage and just try to make the most positive thing come out of it and how to deliver a good ball.”

Battistella graduated early in her senior year in high school to enroll at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette to continue her playing career.

“Right after the state championship, I left to go play. The coaching staff that recruited me, once I got there, they left six months after. A new coaching staff came in and rebuilt their program. I had plans to go with one of my coaches, but they decided not to coach anymore, so I had to go the JuCo route,” she said.

The move to a junior college, said Battistella, helped her to mature as a person and as a player.

“I’m a big homebody,” Battistella said. “That’s why I chose Lafayette to go to right out of high school. My family means the absolute world to me. To play in front of them and being close to home and being able to see them more often than I would going somewhere far away, was always something that I wanted. I knew I wanted that.

“Sometimes, plans change. I think it’s all for the greater goodness of God, His plan. I decided to go to Blinn in Brenham, Texas. That was a great experience. I really matured and developed as a person, a player, and I knew I wanted to come home and finish out my career here.”

Coming home meant transferring to Nicholls.

She was recruited by a previous Nicholls staff and is now a junior under first-year Lady Colonels coach Jonea Rima.

“I was never scared when our old coaching staff left, and we got a new coaching staff. I like to be part of the rebuilding program so I can come back in a few years and be like, ‘dang, I was part of that.’ It was a good opportunity for growth. I feel like the qualities of having a change to different coaching positions will instill great leadership in me in the future years,” said Battistella.

That leadership doesn’t have to wait since it comes naturally to her as the daughter of a coach. Actually, she is the daughter of two coaches. Her father, Greg, a former University of New Orleans baseball player, has been a high school head baseball coach for more than a quarter century in the New Orleans area. Her mom, Rachel, currently is an assistant volleyball coach at Slidell High. Her mom was an assistant coach at Pope John Paul II throughout Kendall’s playing days at the school.

“She was a coach on the court. She wasn’t a mom on the court,” Battistella said. “When we stepped onto practice on the floor it wasn’t, ‘Oh, mom, this or that.’ It was here to get stuff done, and as soon as practice ended, we went back to being mother-daughter.”

Still, having two coaches in the household did present some challenges.

“I have the absolute best parents in the world, but even outside of mother-daughter and father-daughter stuff, even at home, as coaches you bring a lot of that stuff home, too. After a win, it’s good. After a loss, they are home breaking down film or something like that, trying to go to the next step,” said Battistella.

Through the first 12 matches of the season, the young Lady Colonels have struggled to a 2-10 overall record, including 0-2 in the Southland Conference.

Considering her background, Battistella can’t help but come across as analytical in discussing the team, much in the fashion of a coach.

“We just have a lot of young faces right now. We have a lot of people from different cultures trying to come into one, so it takes time to set in and run with it. Going forward, I think when our younger kids get more experience and the more pressure on them and get that kind of in their back pocket, we will be really successful,” she said.

Battistella leads the Lady Colonels in assists with 152.

“Kendall has kind of been the glue of the team in a lot of aspects. She’s definitely an unselfish player who wants the best out of her teammates and friendships, but wants the team to be successful,” Rima said.

Super heroes sometimes change the look of their costumes. Battistella’s may go from Nicholls jersey to lab coat and stethoscope.

“I don’t know what kind of doctor or nurse, but definitely something in the medical field and striving toward being a doctor,” Battistella said of her future ambitions.

All super heroes seem to have a backstory – something that happened in their past that had a profound influence on the person they would ultimately become. For Battistella, it was her father’s stroke when she was only 14 years old.

Her dad, known as “Bats” was part of the Lakeshore High coaching staff when the football team took on Slidell High in a jamboree in 2016. That same night, Kendall and her mom were at Pope John Paul for a volleyball match.

“We all got home, and my uncle called my mom on the phone, and it was like, ‘we think ‘Bats’ had a stroke. We need to get you and the girls to the hospital now,” Battistella recalled. “Luckily, he was at Slidell Memorial, which is like maybe seven minutes from the house and maybe less than a minute from Slidell High.

“Everything happened in an order that basically saved his life. We had to go in, me, my sister, my mom, and his mom, so my dad’s mom, all had to go and tell him goodbye. We thought that was it. We said our goodbyes. I told him, ‘Daddy, I will see you in heaven. Watch over me.’”

Her father was then transported to Tulane Medical Center.

“Then he got transported to Tulane because he had a brain bleed, and they didn’t have a neurosurgeon in Slidell. We all packed up and went to Tulane. He was in critical care intensive unit and the neurosurgeon team came in with a plan. We thought he was going to have to have brain surgery,” Battistella remembered.

Then, the profound moment happened.

“All of a sudden, we had Prayer Warriors pray and pray and pray over him, and then the brain bleeding just stopped like out of nowhere. It stopped completely and he ended up not having to have brain surgery,” said Battistella.

Her father went on to make a 95 percent recovery.

As a member of a family of strong Catholic faith, something very special, Kendall said, took place following the intervention of the Prayer Warriors.

“Oh, gosh, he’s a walking miracle – 100 percent,” Battistella said. “He was on commercials. People to this day still ask him to come and share his testimony and his story. He will tell you to your face that, ‘I should not be here right now.’

“He doesn’t remember much of the night, but he always says that he could feel God’s presence around him. He didn’t see Heaven or anything, but always says he could feel that it wasn’t his time to go. He said, ‘you can’t kill bad grass.’”

From that point on, Battistella has had a fascination with the brain.

“Ever since that happened, I really like the brain – how the brain works and stuff like that. I’m a very mental person. I think mental toughness is something that should be instilled in everybody.”

That’s something super heroes seem to have in abundance.