Tom Hogan was 17 years old when he got his first volleyball head-coaching job, overseeing the freshman team at Mount Notre Dame, an all-girls school in Cincinnati.
Matches at MND followed the typical format: The freshman team played first, followed by the junior varsity and then the varsity. During one particular match, just as the varsity was about to take the floor, in walked Jim Stone, by then well on his way to being a coaching legend at Ohio State.
Hogan reacted like a giddy teenager — mostly because he was.
“The entire crowd turned their attention to Jim Stone,” said Hogan, who is heading into his eighth season as Denver’s coach. “And me being a young, eager coach, I went up and introduced myself.”
That encounter sparked a relationship that endures to this day, and the two men ended up with much common ground in their careers: coaches at the collegiate and international levels and working with USA Volleyball.
Their friendship grew closer when Stone, after his retirement from Ohio State in 2007, moved to Colorado to coach on the club circuit. While at Denver, Hogan has recruited a number of players who benefitted from Stone’s tutelage at the club level.
And when longtime Pioneers assistant Katelin Opitz resigned in the spring, Hogan’s connection with Stone paid a big dividend.
Opitz, who has two young children, decided she wanted to devote more time to being a mom. The time and travel required of her as an assistant coach were too much.
Hogan had little time to fill the void.
Enter Jim Stone.
Hogan invited Stone to lunch and asked him if he might be willing to dust off his clipboard to help out the Pioneers.
“If I can help out, I’m glad to do it,” said Stone, who won more than 500 career matches and produced two national players of the year at Ohio State.
Said Hogan: “He just thinks the game in a different way than a lot of people do, and I think a lot of that is because of his experience at every level.… I felt like since we kind of lost that piece of experience with Katelin that I wanted to replace that with someone that did have a lot of experience.
“I kind of told him I don’t need you recruiting on the road for X number of days. I just need someone with a great volleyball mind that’s willing to talk X’s and O’s, that’s willing to discuss training in the gym, that’s willing to share his knowledge and experience to make us a better program.”
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