Pashke Gjini had a difficult choice – one she never wanted to make.
The Christopher Columbus senior helped lead the Explorers girls volleyball team to the PSAL Class A quarterfinals last year as the starting setter and she led the school’s girls soccer team in goals.
When the girls soccer season switched from spring to fall this year, Gjini had to choose between soccer, the sport she grew up playing in Albania, or volleyball, the one she grew to love in the United States.
Gjini ended up going with soccer, but the choice wasn’t entirely hers to make.
The Columbus girls soccer team forfeited its first four games and, at that point, she decided – with fear of not being able to play anything at all – to go back to volleyball.
“I had to give it up,” Gjini said. “We weren’t playing. I needed to compete in something. I’m a competitor.”
The Explorers girls soccer team has played twice to this point, losing both times. They have forfeited once and won once by forfeit. The volleyball team has reason for optimism and Gjini is a big reason why. She had 14 assists, four kills and two aces to lead Columbus to an 18-25, 25-21, 25-17 win against Bronx Science on Friday in PSAL Bronx A1.
“She’s the heart of the team,” Explorers girls volleyball coach Juan Torres said. “We couldn’t do it without her.”
Girls soccer coach Javier Escudero is, meanwhile, hurting. Gjini was a center midfielder last year for him. She had 16 goals and four assists in the regular season for a team that went 8-2-2 and finished second to Bronx Science in PSAL Bronx A-I.
“She does it all,” Escudero said. … “She still loves the game. Even when I see her in the halls, we say hello to each other. I go to my class, but I can tell she is not really where she wants to be. It’s very tough because I can’t do anything.”
It was the sport Gjini started playing when she was 7 years old, on the streets of Albania. She came to the United States in 2002 and began playing volleyball when she was a freshman at Columbus. Gjini says she is going to try to get her soccer fix with an outside league.
“I miss soccer,” she said. “I think about it a lot.”
Decisions like these are being made across the city. The Columbus girls soccer team is not alone in its struggle with the season change as more than 50 games have been forfeited. Escudero also lost Gjystina Tinaj and Adriana Gjergji to the volleyball team.
“I was on the phone the whole summer,” Escudero said. “I couldn’t get people. Then when we finally got girls they had to make appointments with their doctors because there were no doctors in school. They had to get their mother’s permission. We had to wait on them.”
The PSAL rule is that a player needs eight practices in girls soccer before she can compete in a game. The season, however, started before the school year began, further muddling things.
“It’s been really tough,” Escudero said. “We didn’t have enough girls to start with because I guess it was a bad season to switch it to this time. We lost girls because of volleyball. We really wanted to play, but we couldn’t.”
PSAL rules say a player cannot play two separate sports in the same season. And once Gjini played her first volleyball match last week, she forfeited her ability to play soccer for the rest of the season.
“We still need her,” Escudero said. “We will have a better chance to win if she is back.”
It seems like the Columbus girls volleyball team is the winner in this tug of war.
“She’s our leader,” volleyball teammate Lucia Garcia said. “She keeps us motivated to keep winning games. Without her we wouldn’t be as good.”