Sean Byron, the head coach of volleyball at Marist College, sits down with us in this episode of the 35,000 feet podcast and gives us the rundown on the peaks and dives of his team’s past season. He shares his journey of becoming a coach and ties in travel by discussing some of his top expeditions!

In this episode, we discuss:

• How this past season went for the Marist College Volleyball team (0:17)

• How Coach Byron got into coaching (2:55)

• Sean’s favorite travel experience (5:29)

• One thing that no one knows about Sean (7:40)

• Sean’s advice to athletes wanting to play in college (8:45)

• Sean’s next adventure (16:36)

Getting To Know Coach Sean Byron And A Rundown Of The Past Season For The Marist College Volleyball Team

Morgan: Hi guys, welcome back. It's Morgan. Today I'm sitting down with Coach Sean. Thanks so much for joining us.

Coach Sean: Oh, thanks for having me. Excited to be here.

Morgan: We're excited to have you. I guess we'll just dive in because I want get to know you better and hear your story. Can you tell us about the highs and lows of your current season?

Coach Sean: Sure. This is my first year at Marist. I actually got hired in May and I was able to be there for a week in the spring, the last week of their spring season was the last week in April and first couple of days in May, so I did get to train the team for five days. Not a ton, but a little bit. Anytime you go into a new program and there's change, there's always some struggle. Nobody really goes into a college program and says, "I hope there's change halfway through." Regardless of who was there before or who comes in, the change is always stressful. I thought our kids handled it fantastically. Our PI went up 50 points, our record went up, our MAC record went up, our attendance went up, our weekly awards went up. Pretty much everything that you can quantify went up, but I think that probably the high was that the kids just really, really worked hard and really invested, and I think got a lot out of it in terms of how our season went.

Morgan: I love hearing about the highs and lows of season because it shows a lot how the team got where they're at and how hard they worked, and I can tell that your team worked hard despite it being a hard change. I think that's awesome that you guys were able to adjust to things and keep working hard.

Coach Sean: Yeah, for sure. We had three seniors that played a vital part. Nikki DeSerpa and Megan Fergus were both in the top 10 historically in kills in the program, and Stephanie Stone was in the top 10 in blocks in the history of the program.

Morgan: Wow.

Coach Sean: The three of them really, really bought into a different philosophy and the training aspect of it, and that played a big part. They could have mailed it in their last season, and just chose not to. They chose to be a part of it and really set a great tone as we've turned things around at Marist.

Sean Byron’s Humble Beginning As A Coach

Morgan: I love that, working hard until the end. I'm sure they got a lot of that drive too from coaches because when I played, I'd always look up to my coaches as examples, along with teammates. I'm curious, how did you get to be a coach?

Coach Sean: I went to college to actually play basketball. I went to Springfield, the birthplace of basketball and volleyball, and actually got cut from the basketball team my freshman year. The volleyball coach came and said, "Hey, why don't you come and play volleyball?" And I did that. I played four years in college. I played four years at Springfield, and then my coach Joel Dearing who just got inducted in the AVCA Hall of Fame this past December, wanted me to be his assistant. The assistant position was full for the next year, so he got me a job at Northfield Mount Hermon School, which was up in Massachusetts.

It was a preparatory residence boarding school, and I taught there for a year, and then went back to Springfield as his graduate assistant. I got my Masters paid for, and got to coach, and coach both of those, and I just kind of went from there. I was the GA with both the men and the women, and then after two years they gave him the option to teach and coach one sport. He decided to teach and coach the women's team, and that left a vacancy as the men's head coach. I became an instructor/assistant professor in PE and the men's volleyball coach. It was a nice little transition.

Morgan: That's so cool. Oh, wow. Did you play volleyball all growing up then?

Coach Sean: I played in high school, but it was more or less something to do outside of basketball season.

Morgan: Oh, that's so fun though. What position were you?

Coach Sean: I played a lot of different positions. I played an outside hitter, I played setter, I played DS. Back when I played if you touched 10 foot 10-2, that was a big number and you were allowed to do a lot of things. I got to hit, and I got to play in the front row, and I got to play in the back row. That may not be the case nowadays, but I grew up playing and just really enjoyed it.

Morgan: Oh, that's awesome. No, I love hearing coaches stories because it shows the effort and hard work that goes into becoming a coach. I think that's cool how you got to where you're at, so thanks for sharing that.

Coach Sean: Oh, for sure.

Sean Byron’s Greatest Expeditions!

Morgan: Yeah. What's one of your most memorable travel experiences?

Coach Sean: Probably with volleyball. I got offered to do a clinic in Thailand two years ago, I got to bring my wife and we went to Thailand for a week and worked with their youth and junior training team together. We got to train them for two days, and the translator that I had left after about 15 minutes, said he had to go take a phone call and he'd be back at lunch, and left me with about 40 players and one court. No one spoke English and I spoke no Thai, and we actually made it work through gestures and one pad of paper. My wife helped keep score and helped organize, and it was great. It was really an interesting experience how to interact with other people and not communicate verbally.

Morgan: Wow. When was this?

Coach Sean: It was actually two years ago. I was scheduled to go back in April before Coronavirus hit, but we've postponed that my second trip there and hopefully we can reschedule it shortly and get back out there. That's certainly one of my top experiences even traveling with USA volleyball, and being able to travel all over the world, places and all different events. That's certainly one of the most unique, in terms of Thailand, and the beauty of the country, and just the experience of being able to run a clinic and coach volleyball without being able to use your words was a different situation and pretty cool.

A Little Known Fact About Coach Sean Byron

Morgan: Oh, I think that's so cool. I think it's awesome how sports can give us an opportunity to see the world. That's so fun though that you got to go to Thailand. What's one thing that no one knows about you that you could share?

Coach Sean: One thing that no one knows about me? One of my skills, probably my only skill, is that I'm pretty good with lyrics and bands on the radio of all genres. My roommate in college and I used to play that rock and roll jeopardy when it came out, and we used to be able to just run the board from start to finish. There's no practical use for that skill other than when I'm in the car with my family to be able to hit the scan button and name all the groups from blues, to rock and roll, to opera, to anything.

Morgan: Okay, that's a talent. Wow.

Coach Sean: I'm not sure it pales with Mike Golic's wood lathing, but in terms of the volleyball world, it's up there.

Coach Sean Byron’s Advice To Future Collegiate Athletes

Morgan: Hey, I still think that's awesome, so thank you. Next question, if you're an athlete wanting to play for a team or university, what would your advice be to that player?

Coach Sean: I think one of the things that the NCAA has done a pretty good job with is limiting the early recruiting. I think the early recruiting where kids are making decisions on where they're going to play in seventh grade, eighth grade and ninth grade is crazy. A lot of times they don't know what they want to study, you could go to a school that doesn't even have your major, and they're going to a school for volleyball. I think that if you want to play professional volleyball, you can do that in a lot of places. I think being that the NCAA has moved to it later, and later, and later, we talk with a lot of kids in the club setting and saying, "Hey, how do you approach the college process?"

I think the first thing you have to do is you have to come up with the colleges that you want to attend. You don't necessarily need to know what you want to study, but in general, if you're a math/science person, you're a math/science person. Very rarely does somebody say, "Hey, I'm super into science and chemistry and physics," and then they change their major, they don't change their major to dance. You're basically in one area. A writing area, an English area, liberal arts or science, or a specific position or a specific area of study. I think you want kids to come up with those lists first, and then from there look at the volleyball programs, and look at the coaching staff.

I use it a lot in our recruiting that we want kids to come and investigate the program. We want kids to come and learn what it's like to be at Marist, what it's like to be a Red Fox. The question we always tell kids to ask when you go on visits is, "Tell me what a bad day at your school is like," because everybody on a recruiting visits going to tell you, "Oh, it's great. The sunshine's here all the time, we don't get any snow. It's beautiful. Classes are awesome." But, what's a bad day like? I think that every school and every program you're going to have bad days wherever you go, and you want to know what those are to the best of your ability and be able to say, "Hey, you know what? The benefits of the programs that I have is going to outweigh what a bad day is."

If you're anti being cold and you want to go to BYU, it's going to snow there. There are going to be days in January where it's zero degrees and you're going to have to walk to class in snow. If you want to be on the ski team, Florida State might not be the place for you, it's not going to snow. I just think that those are the things that students are afraid to ask sometimes. I don't think that there's any question that's out of the appropriateness factor to ask your coach or the program or the kids that you're going.

We encourage kids to ask the same question multiple times. Ask the players, ask the coaches, ask other people on campus, spend some time on campus when no one's around, go see buildings, really experience what it's like to go to school there. You're going to spend a lot of time with your coach, you're going to spend a lot of time with your teammates, but you're also going to spend a lot of time on campus and you want to know what the campus is really like. I think the more information you can get about where you're going to go to school... And now it's pretty easy because everything's online, there's tours online, there's admission sites online, professors. The ease and access is great.

Morgan: That's great advice because I love how you're emphasizing on how education is just as important as the sport, because it is student athletes. I love that mindset that you have as a coach.

Coach Sean: For sure. One of the things that we do at Marist that is a little unique is we spend a day in the spring, our spring training is Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Friday, we take Thursdays off from training, and gym, and lifting, and Thursdays we have what we call the Leadership Day where we don't necessarily go to a leadership course where you're going to do trust falls and climb high walls and be on [inaudible 00:13:52], but we'll bring a speaker in. This spring we had somebody from Career Services come over and talk to our players about interviewing, and interview skills, and how to interact in an interview.

The next Thursday, what we did was we broke up the team and we had three people become the interviewers, and we created mock job descriptions, and we had players interview with those three, and those three players had to choose who got the job, who would be your next call, and who is "Hey, don't call us, we'll call you." We videotape those and talk to the kids about, "Hey, you were very fidgety," and the jobs were just random positions I took off the internet. They weren't even real jobs. I changed the name to Sarah's Bookstore and Cheese Human Resource Development, and so they weren't even real positions, but we had our players interact with each other. I think that went aways in terms of allowing them to talk and interact with each other, and practice some practical skills.

Then we took the people that got the jobs and then the next week they became interviewers, so everybody kind of got a taste of interviewing for jobs. If you didn't get a job, you got a second interview for another job. Career Services was great. I think that's important because we talk a lot about kids filling up their bucket when they leave, whether it's study abroad, whether it's Career Services, whether it's community service, whatever they can do to add to their resume that when they're done playing volleyball, whether it's at Marist or they go and play overseas for a year or two years, that they come back, they can empty their bucket on the table in front of somebody, and they can get into medical school or law school or graduate school or get the job that they want because that they've got a full bucket of opportunities that they've taken advantage of.

Morgan: Yeah. I love hearing that because it shows that you care about your players a lot because you want them to be prepared to go into the world, not just prepared for the four years to play, but for after. I think that's amazing.

Coach Sean: Well, thanks. The more success we can give our kids, the more we can sell to future Red Foxes to say, "Hey, this is what we've got, and the people that you're walking in their footsteps have done some pretty cool things in terms of where they've gone and what they've done, and we're asking you to take on the responsibility of doing that as well."

Coach Sean Byron’s Next Great Adventure

Morgan: Oh, it's so true. Well, thank you so much for sharing that. What's your next adventure?

Coach Sean: Well, we're looking forward to getting back on campus in the fall. With coronavirus, we've gone to all online for the spring and we had seven weeks in the spring of training. I was really stoked with how well we had improved in the spring in seven weeks, both physically, both volleyball, technically, tactically. We had a really great seven weeks. We didn't get to play anybody, we were supposed to play Yukon, and we were going to go to Fairfield. We'd invited the rest of the conference to come and do an almost an art of coaching type clinic, which we've allowed all the other coaches of our conference to come.

One coach would run a drill for five minutes and talk to the other coaches about, "Hey, this is what we do in our gym," and then somebody else would say, "Well, we kind of do this, and we kind of do that," and allow some dialogue back and forth, but use our team and Fairfield has demonstrators. I thought that that would have been really good for our conference, and I'm kind of bummed that didn't work out this spring, but hopefully we can do that in the future because I think it's important. Not necessarily that it's Marist against the MAC, but hopefully we're making the entire conference better.

I think that's how you improve your conference, and I'm very, very excited about our fall season. We have a lot of players coming in. I think we're adding seven new players, our roster is going to be 17 people, and seven of them are new. I feel great about that group, and certainly I feel really good about the group that was in the gym that just had a great couple of weeks in the spring training. Hopefully the physical fitness aspect of it, and that the physical strength and agility part will continue because they can do that on their own. We're going to miss the volleyball component of it, as is everybody. I think that's going to be a drawback, but hopefully we can get back at the end of the summer and kick off the fall and be running with it.

Morgan: Well, I'm excited to see where your team goes. It's always fun getting new players because I feel like along with that, it's just new energy. I'm just excited to see where your team goes.

Coach Sean: Well, thanks. I think we are too. My assistants are great and have done a really good job in terms of recruiting. Paul, my assistant, is an official so he travels all around, and Kelsey's an alum so she's great in terms of perspective and the growth of the program, and can recruit some pretty high level kids and is super positive and can jump in and play. She's probably the number one competitor we have in the program in terms of what the score is and where she ranks on the list. We don't necessarily put her on our depth chart anywhere, but she'll be the first to tell you where she is on the depth chart.

Morgan: Wow. Oh my goodness, yeah. I'm super excited to follow your team and see what you guys do. Thank you so much for joining us on this podcast. It was great talking to you today, Sean.

Coach Sean: Absolutely. Well, thank you very much. Wish you guys the best, and hope you're saying safe out there in Utah. We'll be following you.

Morgan: Perfect. I wish you the best luck too, stay safe.

Marist College Volleyball

• Marist College Volleyball Team Twitter

• Coach Sean Byron Twitter

Podcast made in partnership with Acanela Expeditions

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