Washington’s new-look coaching staff in 2023 includes a trio of new assistant coaches working under Head Coach Leslie Gabriel. Hardy Wooldridge served two seasons as a volunteer for the Huskies in 2016-17, and Justice Magraw has served as a volunteer and the team’s technical coordinator in addition to playing four years from 2012-15. But Michael Brunsting is a completely new face to the UW sideline this season. A Southern California native who played collegiate volleyball at UC San Diego, Brunsting got into coaching at an early age but did not make the jump to the collegiate level until 2021. He talked to GoHuskies about his path to Seattle, which included a successful pro beach playing career, and coaching stops at UCLA, William & Mary, and Utah State. And Brunsting discusses how he met his wife, Nicole, a former volleyball player at Portland State.
GoHuskies.com: Can you start off by giving a brief timeline of when you got into volleyball, and at what point coaching started to seem like an intriguing path for you?
Michael Brunsting: As far as playing career, I was late to it. I played soccer and baseball growing up. Just started volleyball in high school and got recruited to play at UC San Diego. I was a setter/opposite. When I was nineteen a friend of mine who coached club invited me to coach with him, so I started coaching right away. And I definitely enjoyed it, I think it helped my playing career a lot. So I coached as an assistant through college, played, and then I was applying to medical school, and I played in my second-ever AVP event and qualified for it into the main draw, and thought this seems like a much more fun option. So I put off medical school and pursued a professional beach career.
During my beach career I coached club and wanted to stay local to Southern California where the best beach volleyball was. So the college coaching game never really appealed to be because often times we have to move around. So I was a head coach for elementary school teams, middle school, high school, I did a season at Irvine Valley College men’s, so I did a wide range and on top of that I coached at Orange Theory Fitness, which was a lot of fun. It’s a different type of coaching but it’s still biomechanical adjustments. It’s funny, I think one of the reasons why I ended up transitioning into college coaching is because I felt like I wanted to get into something that felt like a career, and I wasn’t sure if between Orange Theory, club…
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