BERKELEY – Savannah Rennie can only go with what she knows. Right now, she knows she is healthy. She knows she had to overcome yet another major obstacle in her inspirational path to become a college volleyball player. She knows she can put on her Cal jersey and take the court with her teammates.

Savannah Rennie is part success story, part sympathetic figure. She is an emblem of inspiration, stubbornness and vulnerability. She is the victim of two horrifying physical ailments that put not only her volleyball career, but her life, in doubt.

Savannah Rennie is on the 2018 Cal volleyball team, and she owes it to nobody other than Savannah Rennie. The redshirt junior's drive, will and love for her sport are what allowed her to come back from a liver transplant, and then a bout with Non-Hodgkin's Post-Transplant Lymphoma. Rennie faced two serious, potentially devastating diseases that frankly took someone with her DNA to overcome.

"I think I've proved to myself that I can earn it," Rennie said. "I've worked hard and I've come back from ground zero twice now. I think I've earned it in my life and on the court. Both these things were life-threatening. Who knows where would I have been? I could have been in a really bad situation. But I feel like I just have a lot going for me now and I need to keep it going and see where it can take me."

Call it what you want – unfair, absurd, unbelievable – but at age 21, Rennie has already had to navigate through more harrowing moments than several normal lifetimes. It began during the summer of 2015 when she started feeling severely ill with seemingly no explanation. After several trips to urgent care, she was finally diagnosed with Congenital Hepatic Fibrosis with Portal Hypertension, a rare liver disease that typically afflicts the elderly and newborns.

The cure was a new liver, and after several months of waiting for a match, Rennie underwent a successful transplant on May 18, 2016. She astonished the volleyball community by recovering quickly enough to be on the court for the beginning of training camp less than three months later, and ended up playing in 12 matches during the 2016 season, with five starts.
 


For Rennie, a one-time top-20 national recruit, the future once again looked bright. That is, until the following summer when she started feeling pain in her abdomen. At first, she dismissed it as aftereffects of her transplant or some other ailment. But at the urging of her boyfriend, former Cal swimmer Long Gutierrez, Rennie went to the emergency room to get it checked out.

The news was devastating, shocking and impossible to hear. Doctors had found a lump in her lower abdomen and she had to have surgery the next morning.

"I remember just bawling, saying 'Why me?'" Rennie said. "Why again? There are no words to describe it. I worked so hard to come back from something so difficult. To be shot down a year later was something just as difficult."

The diagnosis of Non-Hodgkin's Post-Transplant Lymphoma meant Rennie was in for yet another prolonged fight – one that would challenge her inner strength and spirit, and also wipe out another volleyball season. Rennie was blindsided by the development and understandably fell into a state of helplessness.

"I tried to keep a positive outlook, but it was really hard because I was so depressed," Rennie said. "Until something like that happens to you not once, but twice, you literally don't want to face anybody. It's not because you are embarrassed, but because you're defeated. I had no motivation. It was the most defeating thing."

Because of the pain before and after the surgery to remove the mass, Rennie said she was essentially confined to her bedroom for about a month after the procedure. Calling it the "darkest time of my life," she didn't want to do anything or have any visitors.

But like during her first comeback from the liver transplant, Rennie knew the road to recovery began with volleyball - not playing it, but simply being around it. It was when she brought herself to begin spending time with the team again – watching practice, spending time in the locker room – that Rennie started showing signs of normalcy again.

"It was so hard for me to see my teammates because I looked so terrible," Rennie said. "I looked so frail like something was wrong with me. But I remember thinking, 'Volleyball makes you happy. Just go watch for an hour.' I started to force myself to go to open gyms and be around my teammates, and that really helped me. I started to be happier, and that's when I started to see progress, both mentally and physically."

Rennie spent the 2017 season around the team as much as possible, but she was also undergoing chemotherapy treatments. But that didn't stop her from going to class and being the loudest cheerleader in Haas Pavilion – on the bench or in the stands.



By the time the season ended, Rennie was feeling strong again. She had her final scheduled chemo treatment two days after the final match of the year and went back home to spend winter break in San Diego. While having breakfast one morning in Solana Beach with her best friend, Alex Rasmussen, Rennie received a phone call from her doctor back in the Bay Area. She stepped outside to answer.

"He said it looked really, really good," Rennie said.

Rennie went back inside and screaming ensued, from Savannah, Rasumussen and even a few others in the restaurant that knew Rennie and her story.

Rennie's thoughts almost immediately turned to volleyball and making sure she got back on the court for this season. But as she embarked on her second improbable comeback, she knew life would never be the same. Non-Hodgkin's Post-Transplant Lymphoma was a product of Rennie's new liver, and because she will need to take organ anti-rejection medication the rest of her life, there are no guarantees the cancer won't return one day.

"I haven't felt relief since I've gotten diagnosed because it's something I have to monitor for the rest of my life," Rennie said. "True remission isn't really a thing for me. I need to monitor it forever. I'm never going to have that full feeling of relief."

In what Rennie's mother, Renee, calls the "new normal," Savannah has been forced to become an expert about her body and health. She has focused on nutrition, exercise, and how much to push herself physically.

It's helped. The weight and muscle strength that she lost – twice – is back. She rejoined the team for spring workouts in January and hasn't once had to take a break or fallen behind her teammates. That included grueling double-day workouts during training camp last month.

"I honestly don't know how she does it," Cal head coach Jennifer Dorr said. "She will tell you that volleyball and school and this community in Berkeley are what keep her showing up every day, and keep making her appointments, and keep track of her health and make her very aware of her nutrition. So many people would have just backed away from the athletic endeavor and just taken care of themselves and just lived a non-excellent life. Savannah refuses that. She just wants to live her most excellent life."



Through everything, Rennie has amazingly kept up with her studies as well. Even last fall, when she was undergoing regular rounds of chemotherapy, she only missed a handful of classes. She even had treatment and attended class on the same day.

"She is just the type of person who is not going to quit," Renee Rennie said. "The fact that she went to class during chemo – she wouldn't even take an afternoon off. She is just the most driven person I have ever met.

"She just has this mindset that she is going to obtain the goals she has set for herself. She isn't going to let any of this stop her or slow her down. She amazes me every day."

If it weren't for Gutierrez, Rennie may have been in an even worse situation. It was Gutierrez who insisted Rennie go to the emergency room, even though Rennie herself resisted. She had been feeling pain in her abdomen and it had been getting progressively worse, but her singular-mindedness and stubbornness had clouded her judgment.

"It was just too much for me to see her in that much pain," Gutierrez said. "She kept saying she was fine, but it was definitely more than she could handle at that time, and she's a pretty tough girl. It's pretty incredible that she was training that hard and basically had cancer that entire time. It's absurd. It shows you how tough she is."

While the recovery from the transplant allowed Rennie to demonstrate what she already knew about herself – that she is driven, focused and generally won't take no for answer - her battle with cancer has made her more grounded. Rennie is a grown-up now, acknowledging the challenges she's been through and the steps she needs to take to care for herself.

"I think she has matured rather quickly because of this," Renee said. "She has become a softer, gentler person. Maybe when she gets a little older she will understand the magnitude of what she has done and impressed so, so many people."



Rennie has helped Cal Athletics host special events at home matches that support organ donation and cancer research, and she'd like to continue to be a role model and activist for both causes. The messages she has for the world are the same ones she tells herself – a formula that has served her well on her two trips back from ground zero.

"You can get through it and you can continue to do what you've done before," Rennie said. "You can turn the page once you get through it, and you can continue on with your life the same as it was. Or it may not be exactly what it was before, but it could be even better.

"I know I can be such a role model, and to suppress that opportunity is just not right. You can always help somebody out there. That's going to be a major key for me going forward. I want to just be able to help. I want everyone to be able to see that they can do it."