Griffin Christian High School senior volleyball player Cara Grobbelaar is from Durban, South Africa but she fits in very well with her American teammates and classmates. Just don’t ask her to spell too many English words — it’s not her forte.

“It can get rough when I’m writing a paper because I sound out English words differently than regular Americans do, so sometimes it’s a bit harder for me,” said Grobbelaar, who recently turned 18. “Thank goodness for Spell Check. It’s a lifesaver.”

Grobbelaar, who has helped lead the Lady Crusaders volleyball team to its current record of 20-1, has lived in the United States since she was seven years old and is a legal resident. She said she didn't have a truly hard time adjusting to understanding the English language, since she learned some core English words as a youth. The only major adjustment for her was getting used to the different school year in the U.S. — in South Africa, school starts in February and ends around Christmas.

"Around Christmas in Durban, it's like the summer break here," she said. "Plus it's a lot warmer there in December. I'm not a fan of the cold winter weather in the U.S. at all."

Grobbelaar talks and acts like a typical American teenager and she even has a pretty good sense of humor.

“I do have a green card, but I was disappointed when I finally got it because it was actually beige,” she said. “I also didn’t ride elephants in South Africa, I always wore clothes as a kid and there was a McDonalds around town for us to go to.”

Grobbelaar, who also speaks Durban’s language of Afrikaans, has been playing sports ever since she was a child. She swam, ran track and played netball in Durban and started playing soccer in the second grade here in the U.S. Grobbelaar started playing volleyball as a sophomore at GC; she didn’t play as a freshman at Spalding High since the public high schools in Griffin don’t feature volleyball.

Grobbelaar’s not the only athlete in the family — her younger brother Dewald is a member of the GC football team and her father was a professional rugby player in South Africa.

Grobbelaar, who stands 5-foot-10, admits that volleyball would probably be her favorite sport, if she was forced to pick a favorite.

“Volleyball is seriously fun and it’s a team sport,” she said. “Everyone has to work as a team with the passes and the sets to be successful. I like soccer a lot too — I’m very good at kicking the ball.”

Grobbelaar hopes to be successful enough this year to play volleyball in college, possibly trying to enroll at Truett-McConnell with teammate and good friend Brittany Foster.

“I would love to play volleyball in college. That would be a dream come true,” she said.