BERKELEY, Calif. — A bouquet of bright yellow sunflowers recently arrived at Savannah Rennie’s office from a friend at USC who supported her through a life transition last year.
“Just because,” the assistant volleyball coach at the University of California explained with a smile.
Just as Lauren Crawford, an athletic trainer at USC, had hoped.
“The whole point of me sending those was to put a smile on her face — who doesn’t like a good sunflower?” Crawford said.
Rennie is having so many far brighter days in Berkeley now. She went through the most trying time in her life upon arriving at Cal more than eight years ago as a freshman preparing to play volleyball, a series of health scares derailing everything she had planned to do on the court and off it.
Rennie’s life has come full circle to bring her back to the Bay Area.
She returned to Cal earlier this year and works inside Haas Pavilion, where she used to come every morning at 5 a.m. and again after dinner to give herself 45-minute IV treatments that doctors hoped would help her avoid a liver transplant.
Now she’s helping to guide the Golden Bears and is eager to support any young women going through their own challenges. While Cal’s season is done, plenty of eyes will be on college volleyball this weekend as rival Stanford hosts the NCAA Tournament regional.
At age 18, and after months of hospital stays and tests, Rennie was diagnosed with a life-threatening liver condition called congenital hepatic fibrosis with portal hypertension. That summer, before starting school, she had experienced unbearable headaches and high fevers, nausea and a loss of appetite, soreness and then pain in her abdomen. She had body aches and lost weight.
Knowing she might not live long enough to receive a new liver in California given the demand and long wait, she ultimately took a leave of absence from school and the Cal program as a player. Rennie relocated to Indiana and waited nearly 2 ½ months for a transplant at Indiana University that saved her life.
She finally got back on the court in 2016 only to then deal with the diagnosis that she had Non-Hodgkin’s post-transplant lymphoma and would need chemotherapy. Rennie was sidelined again for 2017 then played two more seasons for Cal before finishing her career at Marquette, using the extra COVID year and playing as a graduate student.
Rennie realizes now, all these years later, that going through absolute hell as she fought for her life had to happen for her to find her way back to Berkeley now as a coach.
“I feel like there’s moments, it’s like a roller coaster of like there’s weeks it feels like this was so long ago especially experiencing things as a coach,” she said. “It’s like ‘Wow, yeah I did that but that feels like forever ago, but then there’s moments of, ‘Yeah, I experienced that and that feels like yesterday.’”
Even Rennie understands how improbable her path has been to get her back to where it all started.
“Knowing Savannah from 14 or 15 and then coaching her for a couple years, it was obvious that she had a coach’s mentality because of the way she played the game and approached the game, the questions that she would ask the coaching staff and just the way she applied herself from practice to the games,” former Cal coach Rich Feller said.
“I think I probably said to her, ‘You’re going to be a coach someday’ and I don’t know if she responded, ‘yes, no kidding’ or ‘nah, I never will’ but I’m glad to see she’s out here doing it and living her dream and continuing her career.”
So many cheered Rennie during her ordeal — like decorated volleyball stars Karch Kiraly and Kerri Walsh Jennings — and she has plenty of new fans today.
“What I would want people to know is that she is so much more than her story. Her journey so far is just a chapter in what’s to come,” USC’s Crawford said. “Savannah is a very passionate, driven and caring person. … She would walk to the ends of the earth for those people that she cares about and has a view on life that is completely different from any other 26-year-old that I know.”
Having already dealt with seemingly a lifetime’s worth of health battles, Rennie figures she will most certainly have great fortune well into her 80s and 90s.
“The 20s was my time. I’ll keep going,” she said, “that’s what I keep saying.”