The improbable journey of Morgan Stout from Fowler to Wichita State volleyball glory
Surrounded by wheat fields just off a stretch of Highway 54 between the small Western Kansas towns of Fowler and Minneola, a girl used to annoy her parents by peppering a volleyball off the side of their house.
Living in between towns with populations of just more than 500 people, there were no neighborhood children to play with. In fact, she had just five classmates in school.
The girl from Fowler could have never imagined she would grow up and hoist championships, be drafted by a professional league and become the heart and soul of a Division I volleyball team that reached the NCAA Tournament.
“I would look at my older self and think, ‘Oh my gosh, she’s a celebrity,’” Morgan Stout said. “I kind of came from nothing. I literally grew up around nothing but wheat fields and tornadoes.”
Stout’s improbable rise to become one of the best middle hitters in the storied volleyball tradition at Wichita State came to an end on Thursday in a loss to No. 2 seed SMU in the first round of the NCAA Tournament.
But not before the 6-foot-1 senior helped return the Shockers to the Big Dance for the first time since 2017, earned MVP honors in WSU’s dominant run to its first American Athletic Conference tournament title and led the program to an NIVC championship last season.
“I’ve been through a lot, but I would do it all over again,” Stout said. “Every struggle, every hardship, every argument with my parents, it was so worth it. Everything was. I’m truly blessed.”
A family’s sacrifice pays off with Division I scholarship
Without a promise, Mickey and Amanda Stout drove their daughter three hours into Wichita one weekend in the fall of 2016 to try out for Shockwave Volleyball Academy.
The parents saw potential in their daughter, who was more of an athlete than a volleyball player, and they wanted to find someone who could mold an unshaped block of clay.
Shockwave director Scott Larkin didn’t know who Morgan Stout was before the lanky teenager walked into the gym. But it only took one swing — a “scud rocket” that sailed so far out of bounds that it hit the back wall — to change that.
The tryout was actually for Shockwave’s older teams, as the club already had its roster set for the 16-under team Morgan would have been assigned to. But Larkin, who was coaching the 16-under team, made the executive decision to add an extra player to the roster that year.
“You could tell right away that she had the physical talent,” Larkin said. “She just needed some guidance.”
It made for a busy winter in the Stout household, as Mickey was a physical education teacher and assistant basketball coach in Fowler and Amanda was the director of nursing in Minneola. Both worked long hours during the week, then made the nearly six-hour round-trip drive to Wichita during the weekends to allow Morgan to play for Shockwave.
But the parents didn’t mind after hearing someone with the pedigree of Larkin, an Olympic volleyball player, tell them they saw potential in their daughter.
“It was nice to realize we weren’t the only ones who could see that she had some talent,” Amanda said. “That was all we needed to hear.”
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The athletic gene in the Stout family runs strong and has produced a history of athletic success at Northwestern Oklahoma State. Mickey ran track at NWOSO and Amanda was a basketball player, while Morgan’s grandfather, Loyd Stout, and aunt, Paula Crandall, are Hall-of-Fame basketball players at NWOSO.
They strongly believed Morgan was next in line and wanted to give her the best opportunity to maximize her talents. So after she completed her freshman year at Fowler, a Class 1A school, the family packed up and moved to Nickerson, where Morgan would play sports at a Class 4A school and only be one hour away from Shockwave practice in Wichita.
Mickey retired from teaching and Amanda gave up her job at the hospital. Neither had a new job lined up in Nickerson when the family moved.
“Now that I look back, I realize just how much they sacrificed,” Morgan said. “They believed in me and wanted to give me a chance. We kind of had nothing there for a little bit and it was really tough. But they did so much for me.”
The gamble didn’t take long to pay off, as Amanda soon found a job as a surgical nurse at Hutchinson Regional Medical Center and Morgan began to thrive in her volleyball career with more exposure.
Within months of the move, Morgan played so well in a Kingman tournament that WSU volleyball head coach Chris Lamb offered her a scholarship.
“I remember telling Lambo that I didn’t think I was good enough,” Morgan said. “But he was like, ‘No, you are good enough.’ Having six coaches at a round table all telling you that they want you is the best thing ever. That’s why I’ve been so loyal to this program.”
But before Morgan could fully tap into her potential, she first had to learn to tame her emotions on the court.
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‘A rising tide lifts all boats and Morgan is the tide’
The competitive spirit that has been a gift and a curse for Morgan Stout was actually first ignited when she was a spectator.
She always looked forward to the school day ending when she was growing up, so she could tag along with her father, an assistant boys basketball coach at Fowler, to watch practice. The team was coached by Scott Brown, as serious as he was intense, and the sessions were grueling. But the team was a consistent winner.
“I want to be like that,” Morgan remembered thinking.
“We ended up going to the state championship game one year and I think she saw how far being real competitive can take you,” Mickey said. “That kind of ingrained it in her.”
Being raised in a competitive family, Morgan was a natural competitor and quickly embraced a fiery attitude when she began playing competitive team sports in high school.
“We always told her if you aren’t getting your teammates fired up, no one else will,” Amanda said. “A lot of kids aren’t comfortable doing that, but Morgan never had a problem doing that.”
Her passion was a positive when her team was winning and she was playing well. But her passion could be a negative when things weren’t going well. Too often she let her frustration boil over on the court.
“You couldn’t be around her when she did something good or bad because arms and legs would be flying,” Shockwave director Scott Larkin said. “She wants to be perfect and she wants it bad, so she takes it pretty rough when everything is not perfect. We told her in sports, it’s never going to be perfect all the time. So you can’t show that disappointment and that anger. We’ve got to figure out a way to channel it into something more positive.”
At first, Morgan didn’t understand why everyone else wasn’t as intense as she was during games. Why didn’t they want to win as badly as she did? She lived and died with every triumph and every mistake on the court and she wore her emotions on her sleeve.
She didn’t realize it at the time, but she wasn’t mature enough to understand the impact of her volatility.
“I feel like I’ve always kind of been misunderstood,” Morgan said. “I’ve been told that I’m too much. That’s something I’ve learned to acknowledge because I know I can be overwhelming to some people. I let my competitive nature get the best of me sometimes and I don’t think clear. My coaches have told me that when I lose my crap, my teammates are going to lose their crap too. So I’ve had to learn to compose myself a little bit more. I want to be an emotional leader you can count on.”
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By the time she was a fifth-year senior, Morgan had become the heartbeat of the team. She had found a way to keep her competitive fire burning the same, while keeping a better composure on the court when things weren’t going well.
She rehabilitated from countless leg injuries, remained dedicated to training and evolved from an unshaped block of clay to one of the best middle hitters in program history. Morgan finished her senior year with a career-best 392 kills on a .319 hitting percentage.
“We’ve never had a better competitor than Morgan,” WSU head coach Chris Lamb said. “It doesn’t exist. Nobody wanted the scoreboard more than she did. Nobody wanted to keep the ball off the ground than she did.
“And you’ve got to be so hungry as a middle blocker. You just run around hoping for one more touch. It’s so easy to give up in there. You want more swings and the setter can’t find you enough. I’m telling you, busy middles have some of the best and biggest hearts in sports.”
That heart and desire was on full display at Koch Arena last weekend during the AAC tournament. Morgan brought a fiery intensity to the floor every match, but with an NCAA bid at stake, she carried a different aura during the postseason.
There’s nothing quite like the wave of momentum created by Morgan when she is in a zone like she was during the conference tournament. Her unbridled passion, when harnessed properly, has the sheer power to elevate an entire team and the Shockers rode that wave to three consecutive sweeps and their first NCAA bid in seven years.
“A rising tide lifts all boats and Morgan is the tide,” Larkin said. “She has that ability to lift all of her teammates up and get them to play at their highest level.”
“Energy, momentum is a critical aspect of the game and it comes down to who wants it,” WSU junior Katie Galligan said. “Because everybody is talented out there. You can flip a coin and it can go either way. If you want to win, you need to have that energy and Stout has that.”
While her skill development will go down as another one of Lamb’s great success stories, Morgan’s growth in her emotional maturity has been equally as impressive in her journey to become an all-time great at WSU.
Now the girl who grew up surrounded by nothing but wheat fields and tornadoes will head to the Las Vegas Strip to begin her professional volleyball career after being recently drafted by the Thrill in the Pro Volleyball Federation.
“It’s all so surreal for me because when I was growing up in Fowler, I never thought any of this would ever be possible,” Morgan said. “I never thought I would play Division I volleyball. I never thought I was good enough to play for Wichita State. Little Morgan who was 14 years old and super athletic, but very uncoordinated would have never thought I would be here. I guess God just works in mysterious ways.”
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