“Oh no…no,” Angel said as she shook her head and laughed off her embarrassment.
“It’s true” Horsmon said. “Tell him.”
And so she did.
The fifth-year senior middle blocker from Grapevine, Texas is a first-generation Nigerian American.
But this is more than an immigrant success story.
Hers is a tale of royal connection and, as her mom says, divine intervention.
Although Angel said her parents — Stella Edemba and Lawrence Agu II — split when she was about 1, there is no denying her royal bloodline.
“My dad lives in Nigeria now and he’s a chief,” she said. “I think it might be the equivalent of like a mayor, or no, maybe more like a governor here.
“I went there once when I was 8. I was too young to understand all of it, but I remember he has a palace. It has like eight bedrooms and the walls are painted bright colors — pink, orange, light blue — like they do over there.
“I went with my two older brothers and my older sister and I remember everybody stared at us. They knew who we were. My grandfather had been a chief, too.”
While she’d still been married when her youngest daughter was born, Stella said there had been strife before that.
And that led to that special name.
Stella was 20 when she came to the U.S. with her husband, who was considerably older. She had three kids and was pregnant with the fourth as she was preparing to take her nursing board exam.
“I was having a rough time with her dad and I had so much other struggle and for a while I contemplated getting an abortion,” Stella said by phone from Texas. “I even made an appointment to go, but then something came over me and I changed my mind.”
“She was visited by an angel,” her daughter had explained earlier at UD.
Stella would eventually give birth to a beautiful baby girl and two days later she passed her nursing boards.
“I decided to call her Angel,” Stella said with a quiet laugh.
‘One of the glue kids’
As UD hosts its two-day, four-team Dayton Invitational beginning tonight at the Frericks Center (Dayton plays Baylor at 7, then meets Eastern Illinois at 12:30 p.m. Saturday and Cleveland State at 7), there are certainly other Flyers with more impressive credentials and statistics than Angel:
Alaina Turner was the Atlantic 10 Conference player of the year last season and an honorable mention All-American. Jane Emmenecker was the A-10 setter of the year and Janna Krafka was the league’s libero of the year.
But no one on the team has a more compelling back story than The Queen, especially when you consider the long wait she has had to finally ascend to her UD throne.
Angel was raised by her mom, who was a hard-working single-parent until she finally remarried when her youngest daughter was 14.
Now a psychiatric nurse, Stella said she stressed education to all her kids because “that’s the way I was raised. That’s what my parents believed and all my siblings went to college.”
Stella passed the academic lineage on to her own kids and the three eldest have gotten their degrees, two from the University of Texas at Arlington and one from the University of Evansville — and he is now getting his master’s in theater design at New York University.
As for Angel, she said she didn’t blossom as a volleyball player until late in her high school career.
“I was looking at Division II schools and small schools in Texas and then all of a sudden — in my senior year — my game got better,” Angel said. “Bigger schools started to recruit me — Baylor, Texas Tech, Tulsa … and Dayton.
“I said. ‘There’s no way I’m going up north to a place like Dayton, I don’t like the cold.’ But then the Dayton coach came to my home — which was different — and he laid down the facts about Dayton and it sounded good.
“I decided to come for a visit and I fell in love as soon as I stepped on the campus.”
She said she watched the players work out and was impressed by the way they held each other accountable:
“It wasn’t just a coach barking at players, the girls held themselves to a standard. And as I walked around campus there’s a real community feel. Students were like, ‘Hey, come to Dayton. We love volleyball.’ There was a respect for this program and what it’s accomplished. There was real pride in it.”
And rightfully so.
Over the past 12 years, the Flyers have been the Atlantic 10 regular-season champs nine times, won the A-10 Tournament nine times and been to 10 NCAA Tournaments. Last year’s 30-6 record was the third time the program has posted at least 30 wins.
Angel joined the team in 2011 but was red-shirted that first season to further develop her talents.
She played sparingly in 2012, had 12 starts the next year and played 54 sets in 21 matches last season.
Over the summer she pushed herself to get better and this year she is starting at middle blocker.
Horsmon, who had had great success here in the past, returned last season:
“From the moment I got here Angel has been one of the glue kids of this team. She’s one of the reasons we’re special.
“Every single day last year she worked hard and had a great attitude. Even when she wasn’t playing, she supported her teammates and always seemed to find something good in the situation. She never made excuses as she waited for her time to come.”
Prior to this year, her biggest fame on campus may have come when a picture of her in African dress appeared on a poster — made by former teammate and graphic design major Brigid Campbell — that celebrated Women’s History Month in 2014.
“That poster won a contest and was put up all over campus,” Angel said with a laugh. “All of a sudden my face was everywhere.”
Now that face is in the Flyers’ starting lineup.
“She’s a fifth-year player and she’s finally having her moment,” Horsmon said. “It’s neat to see. We’re all excited for her.”
While it would seem everyone has always been happy to see Angel Agu embrace her royal heritage, there has been one exception.
There was that goat.
For him, it was a baaaaaad deal.
“The one thing I remember from that trip to Nigeria when I was little was that my dad had a goat,” Angel said. “It was a pet goat. I fed it. I walked it around. They never told me they were going to kill it for us and that we’d eat it.
“It was kind of traumatic.”
Then, with a pause and a bit of a sheepish grin, she quietly admitted:
“But it tasted great!”
Like Horsmon said, she always seems to find something good in the situation.
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