Life’s a beach for volleyball legend
Karch Kiraly has his eyes wide open, searching out and listening to anything that might make him a better coach. So far, arguably the best volleyball player of all time is succeeding.
Kiraly will lead his top-ranked U.S. women’s indoor team into a semifinal match against Serbia on Thursday, with a clear path to the gold in sight. Two-time defending gold-medal winners and homecountry powerhouse Brazil was shocked, losing to China in the quarters on Tuesday.
Yet Kiraly has gone outside his tight-knit world of volleyball to figure out what it is to be a great coach, including a visit with Seahawks coach Pete Carroll.
“I love to visit any gym or any training site of any coach in any sport,” Karlay recently told NBC. “I know there’s something I’m going to learn. … I got to visit Pete Carroll and the Seattle Seahawks and watch how they train.”
Kiraly also said he closely follows the career of legendary Spurs coach Gregg Popovich, who has won five NBA championships.
“I’m trying to find a better version of myself,” Kiraly said, “and learn ways I can be better for the team.”
It’s hard to imagine a better career, as the gold medal Kiraly won in the inaugural beach volleyball competition in 1996 in Atlanta made him the first — and only — player to have won gold for indoor and outdoor volleyball. Now 55 years old, Kiraly won his first gold in 1984, added another in 1988 and then took home the first Olympic competition on sand.
But he never saw his career going the way of coaching, even if it seemed rather inevitable.
“I could foresee myself having some frustration in trying to help people do what I tried to do on the court and maybe having some challenges in trying to transmit that,” he recently told the Associated Press. “I think if you had asked me in 2004, ‘Karch, you’re going to be coaching the USA women’s team from 2013 through 2016,’ I would have said: ‘What are you talking about? You’re a little batty right now.’”
Kiraly even has signed up to continue leading the team into the 2020 Olympics in Toyko.
“There are some things we care deeply about, and one of them is this idea of family,” Kiraly said. “Not replacing their first family, but being a second family.”
Funny enough, Kiraly’s first entrance into coaching was with his two sons, Kristian and Kory, who were playing volleyball at St. Margaret’s Episcopal School in San Juan Capistrano, Calif., when their father just couldn’t watch anymore. The two boys, 18 months apart, were part of a team that started the season 0-31, and hadn’t even won a set.
“At some point my wife said, ‘You’ve got to help them out here, Karch you’ve got to get in there and just help them taste a little bit of success,’ ” Kiraly said.
As Kiraly’s children grew, they followed his footsteps to UCLA. Now that they’re out and working, he had free time and found himself drawn to coaching the sport that he so dominated.
He’s continuing his impact on the game, and hoping to bring more gold medals stateside — including the first women’s indoor gold in U.S. history — even if he’s not on the court playing.
“Brazil happens to have a lot of things going for it and I wouldn’t have it any other way,” Kiraly told NBC. “I think that’s the perfect place to try to make history as USA.”
The U.S. men’s volleyball team is on to the Rio semifinals, beating Poland in straight sets Wednesday for a fourth straight victory since a surprising 0-2 Olympic start.
The fifth-ranked Americans topped second-ranked Poland 25-23, 25-22 25-20, building some serious momentum at Maracanazinho arena after dropping their initial two matches to Canada and Italy.