Off to Virginia and back to Division I!

After over 15 years, and a lot of mileage, I’m heading back to NCAA Division I volleyball!

Radford University

Last week I was offered, and accepted, the Assistant Coach position at Radford University. The school is located in the wedge of Virginia between North Carolina and West Virginia. The city of Radford is definitely a small one, with a 2020 population of only about 16,000. It’s not some completely middle-of-nowhere place, though. Blacksburg, home of Virginia Tech, is only about 30 minutes away.

There are about 11k students at the university, with around 10k of them undergraduates. That makes it about 8 times as big as Medaille, where I’ve been the last two years. It’s about double the size of my prior two NCAA coaching stops, Midwestern State and Brown, though less than half the size of Exeter, where I coached in England.

Radford Volleyball

Radford Volleyball competes in the Big South conference. High Point, Winthrop, and Campbell respectively won the conference tournament and represented the Big South in the NCAA tournament the last three seasons, so people might know those names among the conference membership.

Radford had a difficult last couple seasons. They went 3-13 in the 2020 season (Spring 2021), playing a conference-only schedule. Then it was 6-22 in 2021, with a 4-12 mark in the Big South. The program got a new head coach in February 2019, a month before everything shut down. An administrator observed to me that the players really struggled with the covid situation. On top of that, you had a new coach unable to work with the team in that early part of her tenure. Obviously, not a good combo.

From 2011 to 2018, though, Radford was one of the top programs in the conference. They won the regular season three times and the conference tournament twice. There was only one season during that span when they didn’t at least make the tournament final. In fact, if you go back to the start of the Big South in 1986, Radford has either won or shared the regular season title 9 times, won the tournament 6 times, and was runner-up 7 times.

In other words, it’s is a program with a tradition of success.

Why now?

This move actually came about quite suddenly. From the time I heard about the opportunity to the time I accepted the offer was only about two weeks. This is not the time of year there tends to be a lot of movement in Division I (though this jobs cycle has definitely been an unusual one!), so I…