‘It just becomes family’: How Auburn’s star outside hitter from the Pacific Northwest, Lauren Dreves, deals with homesickness on the other side of the country
As the arms race in SEC volleyball explodes — and as youth volleyball in the South catches up — Auburn's roster is made up almost entirely of transplants from other parts of the country.
When Lauren Dreves is back home in the Pacific Northwest — back among the big evergreens and looking over the cold rivers and lakes that line the region — she likes to go on runs to the coffee shop with her sisters, or spend time with her cousins. She says she has a big family, with 17 cousins just on one side. They all try to stay close, and almost all of them live in the PNW.
So when she first got on a plane to leave all of that behind and head toward Auburn — a standout outside hitter from Columbia River High School in Vancouver, Wash., heading off to play for the Tigers in the Deep South — she probably felt every one of those 2,000 miles.
But when she got to Auburn, she may have been on her own in one sense, but not alone in another sense: The Auburn volleyball team is loaded with transplants from across the country, who are all in the same boat as her.
“We’re all from all over, so it’s not like we can all just go visit family all the time — so it just becomes a family,” Dreves said.
Yes, Auburn’s 2025 roster only featured one player with a hometown listed in-state in Alabama. There’s also only one from any neighboring state — but her hometown is deep into the peninsula of Florida and still an eight-hour drive away. In truth, when sophomore Emma Moore signed with Auburn out of McGill-Toolen in Mobile, she was more an anomaly than the norm. She was the first in-state player to join Auburn’s roster since 2013. Zoe Slaughter at least spent part of her childhood in the Birmingham area before her family moved to Hawai’i — but beyond Moore and Slaughter, that’s it.
And that trend most likely won’t be bucked any time soon: