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, seasons that saw the Huskies finish 1st and 2nd in the Pac-12, and reach the Elite Eight in 2016. From there he headed to Fresno State with former UW assistant Jonathan Winder to be a full-time assistant coach. After four seasons with the Bulldogs, Winder and Wooldridge both went to Malibu to coach the Pepperdine men’s team in the spring of 2023. Wooldridge then returned to Montlake this summer. He is married to former Husky letterwinner Gabbi Parker, a 2013 grad, and the couple welcomed their first child, Theo, in August.
GoHuskies.com: What first led you to Washington back in 2016 as a volunteer?
Hardy Wooldridge: I was coaching for the Gold Medal Squared company in Arizona, of all places, when I heard there was an opening. So I was talking to the lead coach (at Gold Medal Squared) and he said I should go for it. I think up to that point I was just a club coach, and that’s how I viewed myself, a club coach who did volleyball on the side, so it took someone to say they believed in me initially to make me reach out. I reached out to Tui, actually, and said I was interested. So that was my first foray, and over the next few months as I got into the role I spent time with (former UW assistant) Jonathan Winder and then got the opportunity to go down to Fresno with him. It was just cool be able to do volleyball full-time. When you’re coaching club you do it for a couple hours a day when everyone’s done with work, but to be able to do it full-time with a team and be back in that college environment like I had when I was a player was really cool.
GH: What are some of the other differences between coaching club and coaching in college?
HW: There’s a tremendous amount of time that you get to spend getting better in college that you don’t get in club. A lot of clubs are two or three times a week. I think the thing for me with coaching at this level is every day is a little bit different. The phases of the year are different: recruiting season, in-season, post-season, spring season workouts … I felt like I was reasonably comfortable with the volleyball side of things, but there was another side of college coaching that I had never experienced before, and I really enjoyed drinking from a firehose, essentially. The administrative stuff, dealing…
Click Here to Read the Full Original Article at University of Washington Athletics…