New coach has tough act to follow in tournament
When he was handed the keys to the Stanford women’s volleyball program, Kevin Hambly knew that getting to the Final Four was practically written into the job description.
Maybe the Cardinal won’t make it every year, but it’s a disappointment when they
Kate Formico (right) and Meghan McClure are freshmen for coach Kevin Hambly’s team, which needs two more wins to reach the Final Four.
don’t.
That’s what happens when you succeed a coach like John Dunning, who guided the team to three national titles and eight Final Fours in 16 years. He previously had two national titles in his 16 years at Pacific. Dunning went out on top, retiring after last year’s national championship.
Hambly, 44, had spent eight years at Illlinois, taking the team to the final in 2011 after it knocked off top-ranked USC in the semifinals. He’s hoping to take his first Stanford team to the Final Four, which begins Thursday in Kansas City, Mo.
First, though, the third-seeded Cardinal (28-3) have to beat unseeded Wisconsin (22-9) in a regional semifinal at 8 p.m. Friday at Maples Pavilion. No. 11 Utah (24-9) plays No. 6 Texas (26-2) in the other semifinal at 6. The final is at 7 p.m. Saturday.
Any trepidation at taking over such a powerful program and getting hugely successful players to buy into his coaching “was alleviated quickly once we got in the gym and started working on things,” he said. Pressure? “I knew what I was getting into, knowing what the expectations were going to be, year in and year out,” the former BYU All-American said. “I wouldn’t have taken the job if I wasn’t emotionally and mentally prepared for that.”
The whole team was saddened by Dunning’s retirement, according to Merete Lutz, a 6-foot-8 outside hitter and threetime All-American. When Hambly got the job three weeks later, he called all the players individually, beginning with Lutz.
“His excitement got me excited,” she said. Although much of the team’s strategy stayed the same, Hambly is “a little more willing to experiment” than Dunning, she said. “He’s more willing to add weird things to our game plan that can throw opponents off.”
“He really wanted us to speed up the tempo of our offense,” said 6-6 outside hitter Kathryn Plummer, the Pac-12 Player of the Year. “That gives more opportunities to score and more space to score.”
Hambly wishes he had more time to coach Lutz, 23, a fifth-year player whom he calls “the grandma of the group.” Last year’s freshmen were national champions in their first time out of the chute. He thought Lutz had a more varied experience and picked her brain about the program’s tradition and history.
On the court, he said, “We asked her to carry a bigger loan than she had,” he said.
Hambly insists on meeting with each of the players every other week to talk about school and life in general. At practice, he can be sarcastic at times, Plummer said.
“It adds a little bit of fun to it, but sometimes we don’t understand that he’s being sarcastic,” she said. “We’re teaching him how to make his sarcasm more readable.”
The Cardinal lost two matches early in the season to No. 1 Penn State, then won 23 of their last 24. They have the Pac-12’s Setter of the Year in Jenna Gray, the Libero of the Year in Morgan Hentz and an All-Pac-12 middle blocker in 6-6 Audriana Fitzmorris. Like Plummer, all three are sophomores, boding well for Hambly’s future teams.
They all know that at Stanford, the regular season is a long warm-up to the main event, the NCAA tournament. Last year’s resilient champions lost seven matches, the most by any titlist since USC (27-10) in 1981, the first year of the NCAA championship.
Hambly soon will be back on the recruiting trail. “It’s much easier to get players interested in Stanford than it was at Illinois,” he said. “We can recruit the entire country. The harder part is getting them into school. I’m still learning a lot about it.”
Lutz is the multifaceted Stanford studentathlete to the extreme. She has lived most of her life overseas because her dad traveled so much in the oil business. She lived in Azerbaijan for four years. “When you’re a kid, you don’t really think much of it,” she wrote in an autobiographical piece on the Stanford athletic website, “but as you get older you realize, wow, we lived under a dictator.”
She has a degree in human biology and is working toward her master’s in epidemiology and clinical research. She’d love to work for the Centers for Disease Control and fight viruses around the world.
Now, that’s setting the bar high.