WHY NOT ME?

Why Not Me?

I was a very young Division I volleyball coach at a major university.  I had been involved in a variety of activities with volleyball that allowed me to meet various people around the country.  In 1983 an announcement was mailed out asking for people to apply for several coaching positions with the USA Volleyball national team program.  One announcement was for the World University Games team coaching staff.  I read the description and thought about how exciting it would be to do something like that “someday.”  A few weeks later I received a hard copy of the description in the mail.  (Mail was about all we had back then without computers and email available at that time.)  The copy I received in the mail had the position announcement circled and a handwritten note next to it saying, “Why not you?”   I couldn’t believe this person, an older man, who had been involved with USA Volleyball thought I should apply for this.  I would never have considered myself ready for something like this even though I had been a college coach for eight years.  I thought about it for a few days, and then sent in my application.  To my surprise I was selected as an assistant coach for the World University Games team and was to work with two of the top male volleyball coaches in the country.  They had coached numerous All Americans and had won national championships as coaches and players.

I remember flying to Colorado Springs to begin this experience.  I lived in the dormitory on that beautiful campus and begin meeting the athletes we would be working with.  These were the All Americans I had only dreamed of coaching.  What a great learning experience for me.  One of the things I learned was even though they were the top college players in the country they still made errors playing the sport.  They still needed to be motivated, corrected, supervised and to my delight, I knew more about volleyball than they did.  The coaching staff was fantastic and this was my first (and only) time to ever be an assistant coach.  Wow, what a different view I had for a change.  No pressure to plan the practices, pick the team, conduct staff meetings, etc.  I loved it.  Everything became much more obvious to me as a coach when I was on the bench and two seats away from the head coach’s chair.  I didn’t have to make decisions on substitutions and game plan changes.  I only had to give my opinion of what I saw happening and suggestions for how to improve our chance of winning.  Sometimes I’d think to myself, “I can’t believe the head coach doesn’t substitute that player out of the game.  She is making too many errors.”  It helped me realize how the view of the game and the players change when you are not under pressure to make the decisions.  It helped me learn that in the future I would need to listen closely to my assistant coaches knowing that they had that unclouded view of the game.

The fact that someone else pushed me to think about including myself for a national coaching position allowed me the following experiences:  I got to shake hands with Lady Di when she visited the athletes’ village at the World University Games in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada.  I met Pat Summitt, Kay Yow and many other fantastic coaches.  It also allowed me to be considered for a head coaching position with the USA Volleyball national team program.  I was selected as the Head Coach for the National Junior Team in 1985.  That team consisted of 16 year old players that had national team potential.  The USA national team coaches wanted to get these players some experience in international travel and competition and see how they responded so they sent us to China for 10 days and Japan for 10 days.  Talk about a real world experience, but that is another blog for later!

So now, WHY NOT YOU?