AAGS 2021

39 with grown men at the age of 11, at least in this sliver of life called volleyball. That was incredibly empowering to me and a great gift that my dad gave me as my first teammate, and my first coach. The other great gift he gave me was four years later, we had been partners that whole time and somebody new asked me to play, somebody better than both of us. I didn’t know what to do. I could have seen plenty of fathers saying we need to stay together. I’ve taught you so much, we need to continue on this journey, but he said, you know what? You’re already getting too good. You have to go play with this player. My dad basically terminated himself off the team and encouraged me to go on and see how far I could go. That was another huge gift he gave me. When you started playing for the US national team, you obviously had a coach of a high standard. What did you start to learn about that level of coaching in volleyball? I certainly learned a ton from both my parents, but also, I got to play for some of the all-time great coaches in this sport, at least in the United States. My high school coach, Rick Olmsted and then in university at UCLA, legendary coach Al Scates. And then I got to try out for and join the USA team where another legendary coach, Doug Biel was coaching along with some great assistants on his staff. We were a very young group, very inexperienced, raw, but we could see glimpses of potential so he pushed us, Doug, Bill Neville and Tony Crab, the three main members of that staff, to do things that we never thought we were capable of doing. We stayed together all year round, we trained together about 11 and a half months out of the year. We had learned that we couldn’t compete with the world’s great teams by assembling an all-star team training for two weeks and going to the Olympics or the World Championships, so we turned it into a full-time national team year-round program. We had to go through lots of suffering, not all of it did we like, but it’s easy to look back and say we needed every bit of it. There was so much to learn from Doug. And the next head coach for the next four years of my journey with the men’s national team, Marv Dunphy. And I consider them both friends and great coaching mentors. I’m really lucky as I made that transition from player to coach, to have coaches like that, that I could bounce ideas off of and ask them about decisions and questions. You won gold medals both as athlete and coach. What are the secrets of your success and how do you build a winning environment as a coach?