Pete Hoyer, the head coach of women’s volleyball at Southern Utah University, sits down with us in this episode of the 35,000 feet podcast going over how the past season for his team went, his start in coaching volleyball, some memorable travel experiences, and his advice to future collegiate athletes.

In this episode, we discuss:

• How this past season went for Southern Utah University Volleyball team (0:20)

• How Coach Hoyer got into coaching (4:08)

• Pete’s favorite travel experience (5:28)

• One thing that no one knows about Pete (10:20)

• Pete’s advice to athletes wanting to play in college (11:15)

• Pete’s next adventure (14:41)

The Past Season for Southern Utah University’s Volleyball Team

Morgan: Oh, hi, guys. Welcome back, it's Morgan. Today, I'm sitting down with Pete. Thanks so much for joining us.

Pete: Thank you for having me.

Morgan: Yes, and we're so excited to have you with us today and get to know you better and get insights from your team and you. One of the first questions I wanted to start out asking you is, if you can tell us about the highs and lows of your season.

Pete: This was an interesting season. I think we started off 3-0 in our first tournament and got into our first home match against St. Mary's, and had our starting setter and our second setter both go down with season-ending injuries. Our starter in the first set and then our second setter battled us into the fifth set and I think, one or two points in, got taken out under the net. Yeah, so we add a little bit of adversity, actually a lot. I think most of my career, I've only carried two setters. We had three this year. For the rest of the season, we had to call upon an unrecruited walk on. She's a sophomore, second year on the team and I think only played four or five sets her freshman year. Her name's [Corrine 00:09:50] Peterson. Corrinne came off the bench in that St. Mary's match, won the fifth set, won her starting debut the next night and finished, I think, the season third in the Big Sky in the sixth set, broke two or three school records in the season. She just blossomed.

That was just one example of where somebody would get hurt with some freak injury and somebody would have to play a role none of us expected them to play and they stepped up and did it. That was very gratifying. Normally, I wouldn't be excited about a 15-16 season, but we more than doubled our win total and we did that. We had one practice where we were down to nine players and we started the year with 16. Again, a lot of it, it wasn't, over-training, it wasn't people running into each other in the match or coming under the net. It was freak things. We ended up with four surgeries by the end of the season. I even missed a weekend in the hospital.

Morgan: Oh my goodness.

Pete: Health issues so we accomplished a ton despite some hurdles.

Morgan: Wow, I'd say. Wow. It shows you guys have been pushing through and handling the adversity that's been coming your way well. I'm impressed.

Pete: It was difficult. Alexis [Averett 00:03:32] was in her senior year. She had been here four years. She's the school record holder in assists for her career. She ended up being able to come back and DS for us the rest of the year. She had a shoulder injury that prevented her from doing a whole lot above her head, bad situation for a setter. To see her lose her season, to see our freshmen have to go through a knee injury. Our freshmen, who's maybe one of the strongest physical athletes I've ever coached, and see them go down first major injury, that's tough but, again, watching teammates just step up, rise to the occasion night after night, that was very gratifying.

Peter Hoyer’s Start in Coaching

Morgan: I can only imagine what that felt like to see your team keep pushing through adversity. I'm glad that you guys had such a good season despite the adversity. How did you get to be a coach, Peter?

Pete: Ah, that's an interesting question. Probably the roots of it can go back to when I was 10 years old in a small town in Wisconsin. My family moved to a rural neighborhood where there were about 20 houses and all the other boys in the neighborhood were three or four years younger than me. I was a sports nut. For me to play baseball, football, basketball, I always had to organize it. I really can probably trace my coaching/teaching career back to that moment. The shorter version of it, I was a junior in college, I wasn't playing any sports competitively. A guy saw me playing intermural volleyball and he said, "Hey, you need to come out for the club team." I went and started playing for the men's club team and never looked back. I went from a goal of being a history professor to being a volleyball coach.

Morgan: Wow. I love how life can take us a certain direction and ends up being perfect for the life. I'm glad that you were able to find that path and become a coach.

Pete: Thank you.

Coach Peter Hoyer’s Most Memorable Travel Experience

Morgan: Well, what's one of your most memorable travel experiences?

Pete: I have a couple I've been doing 34 years so you invariably run into issues whenever you travel with a large group. I think the first one that comes to mind, late 80s, I was at, then it was called Southwest Texas State University, now it's Texas State in San Marcus, Texas. We had played a Tuesday night game at Texas Arlington and we had one of those fiberglass buses with the van front end. I had to drive it. I didn't have a CDL at the time so I don't know if it was even legal but I'm driving the van back from the match. It's two in the morning, we're coming down I-35 in central Texas and the dual tires in the left rear come off. We just go right down to the axle. As I'm trying to wrestle the bus to the side, I watched the tire go through the ditch and he hit a car on the other side of the freeway.

Morgan: Oh my.

Pete: Yeah, and luckily nobody was hurt there. I was able to battle the bus to the shoulder. The first thing the state trooper said to me when he came up to me was "Man, last time I saw that happen, it flipped over."

Morgan: Oh my goodness.

Pete: That that made the knees go a little weak at that point. My second one would be flying into Washington, DC, probably one of the first days the airspace was reopened after 9/11. The pilot came on the intercom with about 30 minutes left in the flight and said, "If anybody gets out of their seat or does anything weird, we will be escorted by F16s to a different airport." You've never seen 150 people sit so still in your life. Nobody talked, nobody turned their head the rest of the flight. That was surreal and all the security in the airport when we got there. It looked like something from a much more dangerous part of the world.

Then 2018 was a weird one. We were at our pre-game meal at 4:00 in the afternoon in Sacramento. We had a 7:00 match with Sac State. We sat down to eat dinner and the restaurant manager came in and said, "Did you guys park a gray van in the back of the restaurant?" We did and it had got broken into and five of our players had their uniforms, their shoes, everything because we were going straight to the match, stolen. Our assistant coach, Laurel, lost her laptop. We got cleaned out, basically. We called Sac State, they delayed the match for an hour for us. They happened to be an Adidas school like us. They were able to get sizes so we were able to put everybody in shoes that had lost their shoes.

We were able to using blood jerseys, our spare jerseys that we always travel with. We were able to outfit everybody but two of the players and those two, the referees allowed us to use duct tape numbers on jerseys. Then I had to send an email to the entire conference explaining why players were in different numbers and things for scouting [inaudible 00:09:51] and such. That was a challenge and the crazy thing is we still had to fly to Portland to play Portland State. We still had to fly home and we had six people without IDs. That was interesting as well.

Morgan: Oh my goodness. Wow, you have had travel experiences. That is for sure.

Pete: Well, if we spread them out every 10 years like it seems to have been, I can handle that. That means we're good for another 10 now.

Hopefully, we're done with them.

Something Noone Knows About Coach Peter Hoyer

Morgan: Hopefully. Well, that is so funny. Well, I guess just onto the next question that I have for you. What's one thing that no one knows about you that you can share with us today?

Pete: Oh man. I was just thinking about this. In the same day, my senior year of high school, I was on a team that won a football state championship in the afternoon. Then I raced home because I was in a performance of Music Man that night, the musical.

Morgan: Oh my goodness.

Pete: I was band president so I had that going for me as well.

Morgan: What? Okay, that is good to know. You were extracurricular.

Pete: It either makes me a Renaissance man or a geek. I don't know. It depends on your perspective.

Coach Peter Hoyer’s Advice to Future Athletes

Morgan: If you were a geek, I think that's awesome. I'm just kidding. Oh my goodness. That's so cool. Well, thank you for sharing that. If you are an athlete wanting to play for a team or university, what would your advice be to them?

Pete: Well, I think there's a lot of resources out there with the NCAA rules and volleyball. Most athletes are playing club ball so they're getting recruiting talks and advice and stuff like that. One that really hits home with me now, over my career, I've watched club volleyball go from $400 for the season and you meet at a church gym on Sunday night and practice. The coach is a teacher or a businessman that gives up his time. It's not a for-profit thing. Now club volleyball, at the highest levels, has become a full-time endeavor for the coaches. They're running businesses. It's very expensive for families.

I think one thing I see sometimes is athletes end up pursuing the college experience because that's what they're supposed to do. That's what the path of you pay money for club, you travel all over the country for six or seven years with your club team, you do the videos and all that stuff. Then you're supposed to go on and play in college. I think my advice would be that the first step in this whole thing is it's got to be something you're truly passionate about. I think sometimes that gets lost and you end up with athletes going off to college and just not enjoying their experience, partly because there's something else they'd rather be doing. It's no longer their why, so to speak. I think that's very important because it is hard.

I tell our prospects all the time, "This is going to be the hardest thing you do. It's going to be very gratifying, but you're going to laugh and celebrate with your teammates, but you're also going to cry. You're going to have ugly cries on the phone with mom and dad at night because you had a bad day or a bad week or something didn't go right, or you had an injury. It's going to be hard so you want to make sure that if you're going to put it into all the time and effort that it requires to be a good teammate, you want to make sure you're really passionate about it."

I think that's where it should all start. It shouldn't start with the scholarship. It shouldn't start with because my parents shelled out tens of thousands of dollars for club over the years. It's my obligation to go. I think that's really important. Particularly too, when you're here 18 years old, you're a very different person than you were when you started playing at 12 and under or whatever. There's so much mental and emotional development that occurs. That's my advice is make sure you are passionate, you love it and that should the foundation upon how everything else is built.

Morgan: Wow. Yeah, I couldn't agree with you more. I think it's true. College sports, , they really aren't like a full-time job and it's a lot of dedication that you're putting into it so make sure you want to do it. I love that. Well, what is your next adventure, Pete?

Pete: Hopefully coaching volleyball in 2020. I think we're all on an unchartered ground. As a team last year, we read a book called Boys in the Boat and it basically chronicles a group of young working class young men who come together at the University of Washington in the 1930s during the Great Depression. They ultimately become the National Championship rowing team and go out and win gold medal in the 1936 Olympics. As we were going through that book, it was a heavy read for your average college student. I'm a history [inaudible 00:15:56] so I was on it, but the experiences those guys went through during the Great Depression, being abandoned by their families because their families couldn't afford them working on godly difficult, challenging jobs in the summer just to have food to eat. The star of the book only owning one sweatshirt, all the more well-off kids making fun of him in the college cafeteria. Things that they endured.

I could see a lot of parallels with what we're going to go through the next couple of months here in the world, not just our country. It's going to be challenging. It's going to take resilience, flexibility, perseverance, adaptability, everything. From coaches, from athletes, from everybody as we navigate the next couple of months. I think this is an adventure for all of us at this point.

Morgan: Oh, I agree too. I think we're all going through it together. I think we're going to come out stronger from this. I totally see that happening.

Pete: Absolutely. Absolutely.

Morgan: Pete, thank you so much for hopping on and taking this podcast with us. It's been so fun to get an insight into your team and just hear about the adventures you've had the past few years. Thank you so much for doing this.

Pete: Thank you for having me. I enjoyed it.

Southern Utah University Volleyball:

• Southern Utah University Volleyball Team Twitter

• Coach Peter Hoyer Twitter

Podcast made in partnership with Acanela Expeditions

Theme Song - I’ll Just Be Me by Gravity Castle