Five Questions With: USA Volleyball Women’s National Team Assistant Coach Erin Virtue
Wednesday, January 20th, 2021
Five Question With Erin Virtue:
Women’s National Team assistant coach and senior manager National Team Development Program
Background
• Played at the University of Illinois (Setter, captain)
• Played with the U.S. Women’s National Team for one year after suffering a knee injury
• Graduate assistant at Loyola University Chicago (2006)
• Began working with National Team Program (HP) in 2007
• Assistant at University of Cincinnati (2007-2010)
• Assistant at University of Michigan (2011-2015)
• Assistant at Northwestern University (2016-2019)
• Senior Manager of National Training Team Development Program under Peter Vint (Present)
• Assistant Coach Women’s National Team under Karch Kiraly (Present)
1. What is the path for someone to get identified? What if they’re not on an elite club team or not playing at the open level? How can high school/club coaches work with the NTDP program to alert them to potential athletes?
The first thing athletes will notice is there are no longer open tryouts for our program. Instead, there are four zones that 40 indoor scouts (for girls) will be looking at. Badger Region is in the Central Zone. And what these scouts will be able to see is far more than we will be able to see at a tryout. Our scouts and recruiters will turn over the rocks that haven’t been found. It’ll make life more efficient. We find that we can learn more from seeing an athlete compete in person and with their teams than at a tryout. We’ll be able to identify more of them and better see what they can do. To help with that, USA Volleyball will be partnering with scouting networks like University Athlete. That way, recruiters can tag an athlete in UA. These scouts are already recruiting for college and using UA. Plus it’s free for families. (See more on the new recruiting model for the National Team Development Program on Page 6.)
2. According to you and USA Volleyball Director of Sport Peter Vint, only 26 percent of athletes who should be in the HP/NTDP program are trying out. Why is that? What were the hangups? What is being done to get the right athletes in the pipeline?
That’s a really important statistic. In the last year, we’ve been researching “where are we” so we know where to go. We were able to look at how many of the top recruits and athletes were choosing to try out. The factors included some athletes and families not knowing that tryouts existed. There are some parts of the country that our presence wasn’t known. And tryouts are mainly at certain events. So, for some, that’s not convenient or it wasn’t in proximity to where they live. Also, our process was backward. We were waiting for athletes coming to us instead of going out and actively seeking them and talking to them about what it would mean for them to be a part of the national team development program and play against the best athletes in the country and the world. Having a one-off tryout on a day before a big event and only getting to see athletes for two hours — it’s not enough time to get an athlete’s whole story. Our tryouts were getting a bad rap and were just known for the $90 t-shirt. Having an identification program to help watch and track our athletes will help make this program open, continuous and fluid. It gives us a chance to watch them more and work with coaches who work with the athletes. We don’t want folks to come to a USA Volleyball program leave and that’s it. We want to work with their high school coaches, their club coaches and the Regions. We get that everyone has their stake in the ground, but we want to collaborate with these groups to help the athletes further their volleyball careers.
3. Are clubs and coaches training athletes the right way? What are some of the things you find yourself having to enforce or correct for athletes coming in to the national team programs?
On the women’s side — this won’t come as a surprise to anyone — our biggest thing is finding girls who can stay on the court the whole time. Any time I get a chance to talk a club or high school coach, I make a point to emphasize that we aren’t pigeon holing someone as not a passer. Or that someone shouldn’t play back row. We need coaches to teach all of the skills at the younger levels. It will be to an athlete’s benefit that they play all the way around because they might be an outside hitter when they get older. Even at the national team level, there are tournaments that we enter (not the Olympics), and granted we do well, but we are prepared to possibly take a beating. But we want those athletes to be exposed and get experience. We have no choice. They have to pass. They have to play at that high level to get better. It’s the same with our opposites. The right side hitters are some of the most dominant hitters in men’s and women’s volleyball. But, the pool we are scouting from for that position is very small. Not a lot of girls are being trained to do that and are being subbed out for a defensive specialist. I’d love to see this position be developed more by club and high school coaches in a more meaningful way.
4. Regions, clubs, high schools, etc. are VERY protective of their athletes and don’t want to send them to another club or group for training/development/competition. How do you break down those barriers and encourage everyone to work together?
Every one of our women’s Olympic team athletes is playing for a different club somewhere around the world right now playing at a really high level. They are playing with and against some of the best players in the world. Lauren Carlini (former University of Wisconsin standout), is playing for a team in Turkey, and her coach has a completely different blocking system than we have in the United States. For Lauren, that is really hard because she has to learn that and then transition back to when we hit the ground running in the summer. For us though, the benefits outweigh the negatives for athletes to be competing at that really high level versus just training and not really grow and make those breakthroughs. That can be tough as a coach. I think as long as we are very clear as to “why” we are training things a certain way, that will really help the athletes understand things more. We encourage athletes at every level to embrace the way they are being trained from club up through the national team level. In the National Team Development Program, we’re not the primary developer of these athletes, and we know that. What we want to do is to have more touchpoints with these top athletes throughout the year rather than them just coming to us for a week in summer and that’s it. We understand that clubs are very protective in a positive way. They have the best intentions of the kids in mind. No one is doing that in a malicious way. We want to make sure that we are a part of that solution.
5. In your mind, where do you see the U.S. fitting in on the international scene? How will the United States do in Tokyo?
The last time our team competed at on the world stage was the fall of 2019. And our world ranking is based on what we were able to do in 2019 and anything prior to that. So we have lost quite a bit of time to be able to compete and learn where other teams actually sit prior to the Olympics. Our women’s ranking is No. 2 in the world and our men’s ranking is No. 3 in the world. And that’s just off the FIVB ranking system. There’s a lot of really good teams to look out for – China, Serbia, Italy, Turkey – every team is going to be strong at the Olympics. Those four teams have some of the most talented individual athletes in the world, but our goal as the United States is going to be to “out team” these opponents. We have a really balanced unit and the No. 1 offense in the world. Winning the VNL in 2019 and qualifying for the Olympics and then finishing second to China in the world cup was one of the best years women have had. So we were on a really good trajectory heading into 2020.
BONUS QUESTION: How does Wisconsin compare on the national scene. What can we be doing better to train and then subsequently get our athletes noticed?
As I was getting ready for this interview, I looked and saw that in 2019, Simone Lee (Menomonee Falls) and Jenna Rosenthal (Fond du Lac) played with our National Team in the Volleyball Nations League and the Pan Am Games. The cool thing about the national team program is that athletes can come from anywhere, any state, any region and we find so many success stories like that. And the development patterns are unique to where they are coming from. Wisconsin is obviously one place our scouts are going to be very focused on with the strong club programs, strong collegiate programs and a growing boys population in Wisconsin which is exciting. What can we do better to train better and get noticed? Learn about the national stage and learn about what’s next. Seeing someone who is out there doing it or who has done it, is huge for the girls (and boys). Any time we can talk about what is next – what’s the next dream for a young athlete is just as important as the training and the grind that they are currently in.
