Volleyball
Hearing the Music
By Sean Quincey/Eureka Reporter
Oct 22, 2007, 11:31

Gerry Moore raised a family of musicians, so naturally he didn’t attend many sports events while his two sons were growing up.

That all changed when his granddaughter, Inez Castro-Moore, moved from Lisbon, Portugal, to Eureka this year and started playing volleyball for College of the Redwoods, where Moore taught music for the first 35 years the school was in existence.

Now, Moore, who splits time between his homes in Mount Shasta and the Bay Area, travels to most of CR’s road volleyball games, giving the Corsairs a friendly presence in the crowd when they are in the most hostile of environments.

“It’s great when you’re far away from home and in another team’s home to have someone shouting for CR,” Inez said. “It’s pretty amazing to hear him in the crowd. In the first game he wasn’t too loud, now he yells the whole time.”

He’s enveloped himself in the game. The former professor who was only mildly into sports years ago — he would sometimes take his grandchildren to San Francisco Giants games, where Inez said he “wouldn’t be enthused” — googled volleyball rules once he started attending the games. Now, Inez said, he knows the intricacies of the sport, from the complicated rotations to terminology and strategy.

It’s a far cry from the attitude Inez said Gerry had when he was a teacher.

“He always thought people who play sports would be super distracted,” Inez said. “That’s why he never liked college sports. ... He always tell us we have to study. Maybe he thinks sports would not get us anywhere.”

Inez has been a model for hard work since her days in Portugal.

The daughter of a beach volleyball player, Inez has played volleyball since she was in the fifth grade. She played on her high school team as well as a national champion club team in North Portugal. It was with that team that Inez learned to not only step up her play on the court, but in the classroom as well.

“It was totally different than what I was used to,” she said. “We played 28 games and I only got in on two of them. It was a new way of taking volleyball. It was much more serious. You had to practice hard to be able to play.”

When she went back to Lisbon, she was improved as a player, and her practice habits crept into her schoolwork.

“You have to be so disciplined in practice,” Inez said. “At some point in volleyball, I didn’t want to go to practice anymore, but I have so many years invested in it, it’s not worth giving up. When I get frustrated or sick of volleyball, or school, I always think I’ve been doing this so long there’s no point in stopping now. All that effort would be wasted.”

Inez is taking a bunch of math and science classes at CR, getting “mostly A’s.” She hopes to go to medical school after her days in Eureka. Her brother, Benjamin, went to CR and now is in his last year studying architecture at UC Berkeley.

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