GCU, the ever-growing school in the desert, has volleyball programs on the rise

When Tim Nollan left USC to be Grand Canyon’s women’s volleyball coach in 2016, the school’s sports programs still were in the transitional phase from Division II to Division I. 

He didn’t even have an office. 

The building that would house his and other athletic offices was still a dirt lot on the sprawling West Phoenix campus.

Camden Gianni remembered how, during his freshman season with the GCU men’s volleyball team, the then-seniors would talk about how much the campus had changed during their time at the school. Now a redshirt junior, Gianni is telling incoming freshmen how much the campus has changed during <ital>his<end ital> time at Grand Canyon.

Family and friends would give Allison Hansen quizzical looks and pepper her with questions when she told them she was going to Grand Canyon to play beach volleyball. They knew very little – or nothing at all – about the school, she said.

Three years later, the Grand Canyon beach team no longer is unknown. The same could be said for all of GCU’s volleyball teams and its athletic programs in general.

In less than a decade, Grand Canyon went from being an obscure little school in the desert to a prominent player on the Division I stage, particularly in volleyball. All three programs have experienced rapid growth and incremental success over the past seven years.

“The goal that we all have as coaches is to win conference championships and make it to NCAAs and compete for a national championship,” said beach coach Kristen Rohr, in her eighth season with GCU. “That’s just kind of the standard the school sets for its athletics and the standard we set for ourselves.”

Rapid expansion

The fast rise of GCU’s volleyball programs can be tied to the university’s sudden growth.

Founded in 1949 in Prescott, Arizona, Grand Canyon College was a Baptist-affiliated school that focused on degrees in religious studies. Two years later, it moved 100 miles south to a 90-acre tract of real estate in West Phoenix.

Programs of study and student population continued to expand, and by the early 1980s, Grand Canyon was set to move to full-blown university status. That became reality in 1989, 40 years after the school’s founding.

But a little more than a decade later, according to the GCU website, the school was on the brink of financial collapse. In September 2003, a group of investors bought the university and turned much of its energy toward online education. That proved…