Wisconsin volleyball’s Julia Orzol, Gulce Guctekin adapt to language

MADISON – The mental gymnastics of it all can make Gulce Guctekin’s head hurt.

College, after all, is a major life change.

For some it’s the first time they’ve been so far from home for so long. Everyone is new. Very little is familiar.

Now put yourself in the shoes of Gucteckin, a freshman on the Wisconsin volleyball team from Turkey, or her teammate, Julia Orzol, a sophomore from Poland.

Neither had been to the United State much less the UW campus before arriving as freshmen. As both worked to establish their place in the program, there was not only the challenge of speaking in a second language all the time but also learning in it.

College is hard enough in one’s native tongue much less a second language that hasn’t been completely mastered. It is much harder than either Orzol or Guctekin is making it seem.

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“Julia, she was a 4.0 student last year. I think she had the high GPA on the team, a kid coming from Poland, so think that tells you a little bit about her work ethic,” UW coach Kelly Sheffield said. “And I think G.G., her scores and grades were good enough I think she got accepted to Harvard, if I’m not mistaken.”

The Badgers volleyball team has had other international players. Giorgia Civita, a native of Italy, helped the team win a national championship last season. Romana Kriskova helped the team reach the regional final in 2016. Both those players came to UW as transfers who had cleared any hurdles created by a language barrier earlier in their career.

Orzol and Guctekin are making the transition here. The effort has not only is taking their smarts, but the humility to to admit when they don’t understand something. There has also been academic support from the athletic department and a regular diet of classic sitcom re-runs.

“It’s hard to understand at the beginning of classes, so I was really struggling,” Guctekin said. “For me it was hard at those times. Now I feel more comfortable because I’m used to be(ing) here and I start to understand better and I ask questions, so in between people I connect more.”

Guctekin, Orzol studied English in their homelands

Guctekin, whose name is pronounced GOOL-jay GOOCH-teh-kin, started learning English in high school. The lessons were based more on understanding the grammar of the language than using it in conversation.

Orzol, whose name is pronounced Yuh-lee-ah OR-zhol, began taking lessons when she was about 10 and had one-on-one sessions in which only English was spoken.

That experience helped her transition to classes, but getting used to the informal use of the language was tough.

“When somebody’s speaking fast and quickly, a slang-based language, that was like a challenge for me,” Orzol said. “Or like talking with kids,…