McAleavey instills law and order, on-and-off the court

By Benjamin Shinault

Not many freshmen step onto the court at Rider and are immediately bestowed the honor of being a captain of a team. For graduate student middle hitter Carley McAleavey, of the volleyball team, she is one of the few.

Outside of being an efficient player for the Broncs, being named to the 2022 All-Metro Atlantic Athletic Conference Rookie Team, graduating from Rider one year early and pursuing a master’s with a focus on sports management, McAleavey’s next step in her collegiate journey is to pursue law school.

The balancing act

Coming in as a freshman, McAleavey’s original major was political science, but as classes came and went, the interest diminished and a switch to business administration and legal studies materialized.

Student athletes at Rider are required to have at least eight hours of study hall to focus on their academics and for McAleavey, this time proved to be crucial in her development as a student athlete.

“There was kind of set time for me to get my academics done and all my studies but, even outside, just being in my dorm room, if we weren’t playing volleyball, we weren’t at practice, we were working hard in the classroom,” McAleavey said.

Despite being on the road, practicing during the week and having team lifts, Rider student athletes as a whole have a better cumulative GPA than the rest of the student body.

“It’s impressive and a big pat on the back for us athletes,” McAleavey continued, “We have those hours set in stone to get that grit in the classroom just as much as competing at a high level.”

Being a former captain on the volleyball team is not  the only position of power that McAleavey holds as she is also the president of the Student Athlete Advisory Committee, which serves as the voice for Rider’s student athletes.

She graduated in May 2025 and entered the transfer portal to pursue classes aimed toward her goal of studying law while also playing volleyball.

“My main goal when I was graduating early was to take the [Law School Admission Test] then I was going to go straight into law school,” McAleavey said, “but then I was able to come back to Rider, Coach Rotondo got me to stay.”

McAleavey looked at some of the Broncs rivals like George Washington University and Long Island University, and other smaller schools near her hometown of Smithtown, New York, but the veteran middle hitter decided to stay in Lawrenceville.

Coach’s vision

The man who made McAleavey bury her roots in the Alumni Gymnasium was Head Coach Jeff Rotondo. 

When McAleavey entered the portal, Rotondo kept it blunt with his middle hitter for the last three seasons. 

“Why would you leave your family,” Rotondo said, “It was just a matter of discussing with her, like, ‘hey, this is your family and you know you love it here, why would you want to go anywhere else and move four or five states away?’”

Getting McAleavey back to Rider was critical to the Broncs scheme for the 2025 season as McAleavey’s impact on the court goes far beyond her kill and block statistics.

“She’s got one of those personalities that everybody flocks toward and like I said, she’s funny, she’s sarcastic, in a good way, but she’s also serious and trains at a really high level,” Rotondo said.

For the Broncs this season, seven of the 18 players on the squad are freshmen and having McAleavey around, serves as a great example as to what to be both on the court and in the classroom.

“[Freshmen] see her in the gym, they see her at weights, they see her with her academics but they also see that she has fun, so she’s really serious and gets a lot of work done, but she also enjoys what she’s doing and I think that’s a really really good presence for the youth to see,” Rotondo said. 

Rotondo and his staff do a lot of work when it 

comes to managing the 18 players on the squad, leading scouting for opponents and scheduling practices, but for Rotondo, he believes McAleavey does more than his staff.

“I always say, I don’t know who works harder, my staff or her because I think she had three or four internships this summer and she was booked,” Rotondo continued, “I think she was working 60 to 70 hours a week over the summer.”

This summer, she  interned at the New Jersey Department of the Treasury, served as a legal intern in the law office of Kelly Anderson Smith and served as a major crimes bureau intern in the district attorney’s office for her home county, Suffolk County.

On the court

Rotondo made it clear that he believes McAleavey’s impact is sometimes ignored by the MAAC when it comes to choosing All-MAAC teams.

“She is one of the top middles in the conference statistically every year and it’s crazy that she doesn’t get the recognition for an All-MAAC team,” Rotondo said.

Stepping away from the classroom and looking at McAleavey’s dominance on the court, standing at       six-foot-one, she was fourth in hitting percentage by the end of the 2024 season and so far this season, is 10th in blocks and fourth in hitting percentage.

Despite the season being fresh and the Broncs sitting with a record of 1-4 as of Sept. 8, McAleavey’s mind is still set on attending law school at the end of the year.

McAleavey states she is looking at a few options for law school, some being Drexel University, Rutgers University, Hofstra University or other schools near Long Island, New York.

Wherever she goes, McAleavey will continue to bring her funny, yet serious, attitude to her next campus and maybe even a court room near you.