UCLA men’s volleyball coaches balance collegiate and national roles

Three UCLA men’s volleyball coaches traded their blue and gold for a summer of red, white and blue after the 2015 NCAA season.

As the team’s players scattered for the offseason, head coach John Speraw and assistant coaches Andrea Becker and Brad Keller united under a common goal: representing the United States on sidelines across the world.

Speraw, the head coach of the U.S. Men’s National Team since 2013, was joined by Becker on the national team staff. Becker, who holds numerous positions in the organization, is primarily the team’s sports psychology coach, although she is also a consultant coach and helps with general tasks like coordinating between the team and the host country.

While Becker’s role at UCLA included game scouting and daily office operations, she is able to focus on the psychological aspect of the sport with the U.S. team.

“Most sports psychologists go in and they meet with a team once a week – or once every couple weeks – and they give that team stuff, like doing a candid presentation using buzzwords,” Becker said. “I’m unique in that I kind of work through John and with him. One of the things that John and I do nicely is use one voice – if we’re both saying something we’re typically sending the same message.”

Since working together at UC Irvine in 2012, both coaches have been able to gain a wide range of experiences across both college and national levels.

“I think there’s some value in coaching both (college and international) at the same time,” Speraw said. “As long as you’re coaching, you’re getting better at coaching. The age group is a little different, the level is a little different, but I feel like as I continue to coach and train teams, I have a creative idea here and there that I can implement and, if it works, I get to carry it on to my next task.”

The national team just concluded its 12-game FIVB World League schedule and, in less than two weeks, will play in the final round in Rio de Janeiro. After winning its first six home matches, the U.S. was swept twice by Iran before rebounding with a pair of wins in Russia and a split in Poland. The Americans are looking to qualify for September’s FIVB World Cup in Japan, which is the first qualifying tournament for the 2016 Summer Olympics.

With the Olympic pressure building, balancing both jobs is not without its difficulties.

Most of the day-to-day national team duties are handled by the team’s full-time assistant coaches during the academic year, Speraw said. The U.S. assistant coaching staff is able to sustain daily operations that the UCLA coaches can’t focus on when the NCAA season is in full swing.

That separation between national and collegiate teams allows for a little bit of both mental and physical space between the two.

“When I go to (coach) USA, I just put on the U.S. hat,” Keller said. “I never take my UCLA stuff with me. You just kind of switch gears. … I try to separate it as best as possible.”

Keller, an assistant coach with the U.S. Boys’ Youth National Training Team, will return to the younger U.S. team in August for the FIVB Boys’ U19 World Championship.

At the 2014 NORCECA (North, Central America and Caribbean Volleyball Confederation) U19 Continental Championship, he said that he was able to see the sport from a broader perspective.

“Something that I learned right off the bat is that there are so many styles of volleyball,” Keller said. “Cuba plays very differently than Puerto Rico, Puerto Rico plays it differently than us, all the way down the line. This summer we’re gonna go down to Argentina for the world championship and we’re gonna get all different styles.”

While the day-to-day work at different levels of play is done independently, the coaches say that the collective volleyball knowledge and experience has proven to be major benefit to the UCLA program.

“It actually helps our UCLA team a lot because we get to bring ideas back,” Keller said. “We’re just trying to get better at the game, and I think the USA stuff and the international chances to go over and compete are great lessons for us.”

Keller’s national coaching duties this summer will conclude with August’s U19 tournament, but the Olympic qualification process has the potential to be lengthy and stressful for both Speraw and Becker. The key, Speraw said, will be qualifying as early as possible since the U.S. will only have two more chances after the World Cup, with international tournaments potentially overlapping with the collegiate season.

“Really, the big goal this summer involves qualifying for the Olympic Games,” Speraw said. “The rest of the summer is really about trying to help this team peak and play its very best volleyball in September – that’s really the goal, to see if we can improve and to get ourselves to the place where we can qualify with the first opportunity.”