It was without a question that Team USA enjoyed a rewarding year since they clinched the bronze medal in the Rio Olympics last August. Head Coach Karch Kiraly who remains his post does not want to take a break and has already had his eye on Tokyo Olympics 2020, according to his recent interview with volleyballmag.com.
Karch Kiraly is in his second quad as the head coach with a roster full of young faces with relatively limited international experience. Currently in the training camp in Anaheim are returning Olympians Carli Lloyd, Kelsey Robinson and Kelly Murphy.
Key Changes in the Team Roster
While most international competitions allow for 14 players on the roster, at the Olympics there are only 12. Kiraly figures that just seven will or might return such as two middles Foluke (Akinradewo) and Rachael Adams, one setter in Lloyd, outsides Larson, Hill and Robinson and one opposite, Murphy.
So far it is only known that some of them will be missing for sure including Captain Christa (Harmotto) Dietzen, setters, Alisha Glass and Courtney Thompson, Opposite Spiker Karsta Lowe and libero Kayla Banwarth have announced their retirement. Accordingly, Alisha Glass is getting married and starting a family; Kayla Banwarth has launched her coaching work at Nebraska and Karsta Lowe’s starting architecture school in August at USC.
“Jordan and Foluke have been with this program a long time and I had no idea what they wanted to do. They are insisting that we keep the door wide open for the possibility of playing for another four years. That doesn’t mean they’re gonna be able to play four years, Maybe somebody will hit the wall a year from now and say, ‘I tried, I’m done, I can’t do it anymore.’
“There will be injuries. We don’t want to have any of those, knock on wood, but just the fact that they’re staying they’d like to keep the door wide open to that possibility is heartening because they’re really special people. Foluke played her first USA senior team trip in 2005, 12 years ago, and Jordan started in 2009. To have those people say, ‘I’m really interested in the possibility of going more and I valued the experience that I had in the last four years,’ I’m really excited about that.
“Of course, they’ll have to keep earning it and keep playing at the level they’re at now. And that’s no guarantee as they already have lots of miles on the odometer. But it’s great to have really quality people who are elite performers in their particular position and have been world-class players and world-class performers for many, many years.”
However, they will not be on the still-to-be-named roster for the June 17-25 Pan American Cup in Lima, Peru. The team will play in the FIVB World Grand Prix July 7 through August 6 and then play in the FIVB World Grand Champions Cup in September.
A big question is who will join Lloyd at setter. The group includes Carlini, Hancock, Dannemiller and former Stanford star Madi Bugg.
“They’re all doing a really nice job,” Kiraly said. “It’s a great group of five. We had a great group of five four years ago with Alisha Glass, Courtney Thompson, Jenna Hagglund, Carli — who was not active at all in 2013 because of some injuries — and Molly Kreklow came into the picture in 2014.
“And we now have a great group of five and they’re incredibly mindful and they’re focused on getting better and that’s not that much different from the group four years ago.”
It all adds up to what should be an interesting and fun quad.
“It’s an exciting year,” Kiraly said. “This is a year for our program — for every program, not just our program — to give some veterans a chance to recharge, physically and mentally, people like Foluke and Jordan and Kim Hill and Kelsey and Rachel and lots of others. You know, four years ago Jordan Larsen took some time off, didn’t go to Grand Prix, didn’t go to Pan Am Cup, and those were wonderful opportunities for Kim Hill to be thrown into the deep end and learn and develop.
“A year and a few months later she’s having an MVP performance in leading us to a world-championship title. So that was actually a huge benefit to us to have some people like Jordan resting at that time. We’ll have people like that resting again this year and certainly there will be some struggles along the way, because they haven’t played lots of big USA matches, haven’t played in the Olympics or the world championships or the World Cup. And that’s OK. This is a great year to work through some of the ups and downs of that.”
Staff Team is ALL NEW as well
Not only the players, Kiraly is also facing a complete turnover of the staff team . The newly hired include assistant coaches Tama Miyashiro, Erin Virtue and Jon Newman-Gonchar, technical coordinator Jeff Liu and athletic trainer Kara Kessans.
“Essentially the whole staff has turned over and that took longer than I would have liked it to,” Kiraly said. “It was a good and really challenging process to go through … I’m OK with hiring a brand new staff. I would not want to do it every year. That was a lot of work.”
A similarity to four years ago, he said, is all the new faces in the gym. For that matter, it looked like a Big Ten reunion, with players like Amber Rolfzen, Justine Wong-Orantes and the aforementioned Robinson from Nebraska; Tori Dixon, Sarah Wilhite, Hannah Tapp, Paige Tapp and Lauren Gibbemeyer from Minnesota; Micha Hancock, Aiyana Whitney, and Megan Courtney from Penn State; Liz McMahon and Michelle Bartsch from Illinois; Annie Drews from Purdue; Lexi Dannemiller from Michigan and Lauren Carlini from Wisconsin.
“We’ve got to be really good at teaching and facilitating learning,” Kiraly said. “I think we’re better than we were four years ago. We’ve upgraded a number of things in terms of how quickly we can ramp people up into our systems and learning about how we play the game and learning about why we do what we do.”
