The interview: Diane Flick

I first met Western Washington University volleyball Head Coach Diane Flick when I knew nothing about the game. Maybe less than nothing. I had been hired by athletics to be PA announcer in the summer before the 2005 season. Much like this season, that one started with two matches that took place before school began. That year, the ‘double shot’ was against the two Alaska schools (Anchorage and Fairbanks) in the league, meaning there were fewer traveling fans than usual (frankly I was impressed there were any). So there was much more room for me to stand out. And I’m sure many in the audience cringed at my naivete.

Coach Flick had already put together a pretty successful track record at that point. She first came to WWU in 2000, the last year the school was part of the Pacific-West Conference before it and nine others broke away to form the Great Northwest Athletic Conference, where WWU remains today. It was also one the low points of the program’s history, as they had posted their first losing season in two decades in 1999, but as you’ll read, Flick was undeterred by that. After a decorated four-year career at the University of Washington as a setter and an outside hitter (not a common combination), Flick served as an assistant for the Huskies for two years before taking on her own program. In her first 12 years as WWU head coach, her teams have compiled a 249-70 record on the court, making six NCAA tournaments and reaching the championship match in 2007 (as I’ve written about before).

In our interview, Coach Flick touches on home court, recruiting, what goes on for a coach at the Division II level — and why she’s perfectly happy there — and more.

The Net Set: This past weekend was my first time back at Carver Gym in a couple of years. First thing I noticed, and something I wrote about, was all the fancy new toys in the gym. Have they been there long?

Diane Flick: Gosh, I think it’s been about two years since it’s been there? It’s something that (marking director) Steve Brummel was able to put together, to get us the video board, the one that’s outside the gym, and the scoreboard to kind of make it feel like a more exciting home atmosphere.

TNS: It’s long overdue!

DF: Carver Gym is what it is. We’re in the works, and designing for a renovation of Carver Gym to start in 2013.

TNS: That’s exciting.

DF: Yeah. But right now, it’s kind of putting lipstick on a pig. But it’s pretty lipstick we’ve put on it.

TNS: How did you first become involved in volleyball when you were young? Was it as simple as going to a match, and saying ‘Hey that looks like fun,’ or did a coach drag you to into it, how did it happen?

DF: No, I have an older sister who’s five years older than me, and she was the one that got into volleyball first, and like any little sister who wants to follow in her big sister’s footsteps, that’s what I did. And I just followed her everywhere she went, and she taught me the game and got me into it.

TNS: And the rest was history! What were the early days at WWU like?

DF: Well, in general we had a lot of good pieces to the puzzle that were sitting here. They were just hungry to have some discipline and have a higher standard ahead of them, and that’s kind of what I provided — showing them the maximum level they could play at. But the actual bodies that were in the gym were good players. I think I may have brought in one person my first year, but we stayed with the same roster as when I joined up in 2000, and each year we’d set the bar a little bit higher for the next group to have to surpass. It was a great way to start, because if you don’t have the pieces to the puzzle to start off with then we wouldn’t have had a good jumping-off point.

TNS: It can sure be tough if you don’t — there are certainly teams that never seem to get a whole lot better year to year. And on that note, what’s recruiting like? I noticed several players redshirting this season, and I don’t remember that happening as much in past years.

DF: Yeah, we’ve kinda started probably in the last….four years or so, we’ve had the opportunity to redshirt our freshmen coming in. There may be a player here and there that we either need by position or they can start right away. Probably right around (senior outside hitter) Marlayna (Geary)’s freshman year, her and (senior middle blocker) Bailey Jones started and (junior outside hitters) Emily Boerger and Kinsey Davis redshirted. And so, probably from that year on, it’s been really good to get them in to train. The transition from high school to college on every level, not just playing, is so hard. So it gives them a chance to get their feet wet academically and socially and all that. And they also get in the gym a little bit and know what it’s like. It’s been great for us to be able to do that for the last four or five years.

TNS: Another yearly trend I’ve noticed is that you never have players from outside the state of Washington on your teams. Is there anything to that?

DF: Not really, no. Those are just the players we’ve found. There’s talent in Washington, and there’s really no need to go elsewhere looking for it.

TNS: Do you try to keep in touch with your old players? I noticed (2008 graduate) Katie Robinson at one of this weekend’s matches.

DF: Yeah, I like to keep in touch with my alumni. You spend a lot of time, and a lot of emotion, together, and I keep in touch with a lot of my alumni. Not only was Katie there, (2009 graduate) Angie Alvord was there, (2010 graduate) Allie Gotz was there, (2011 graduate) Megan Amundson’s coaching with us. (2010 graduate) Kathryn Mertens would be there if she wasn’t doing that medical-school thing! There’s a lot of them that keep in touch, because you build that relationship when you’re coaching.

TNS: That’s quite nice. On that same note, how well do you get to know the GNAC coaching fraternity? Most of the teams in the league have the same coaches from when I worked PA several years ago.

DF: Yeah, there’s a new coach for Billings, but other than that, the coaches have all been around for a good five or six years at least. You spend meetings together, you see each other on the recruiting trail, you see each other at matches. And we’re also in a common battle together. Our teams battle against each other, but it’s the GNAC versus the Pac-West, versus the CCAA (ed note: that’s the California Collegiate Athletic Association, which the NCAA selection committee tends to pretty flagrantly overrate when assigning at-large tournament bids, such as victimized WWU in 2009. The three conference champions all get bids, then five at-large bids are in theory available to all three conferences. That year, all five went to the CCAA) at the regional level. So we’re all competitors, but we’re rooting for each other on that end, too. And we had a really great preseason as a GNAC (the top five teams were a collective 28-12, including WWU’s 7-1 mark).

TNS: What’s a typical day in the life like for an NCAA head coach? Match day versus non-match day.

DF: Well, they’re not a ton different. You’re watching a lot of film, you’re working a lot of practice, you’re having an open-door policy for your players for whatever they’ve got going on, and for me I try to get home in enough time to spend some time with my six-year old, and be a normal person for a little while. But most of the time I’m on call, so if they need anything, my players know that they can contact me whenever. There’s office work, there’s practice time, and there’s home time. Sometimes the order of those might change depending on match day versus a regular day.

TNS: I was gonna ask this a little later, but this is a good segue — do you think your daughter will take up the game?

DF: (laughs) Weeelllll….I don’t know. I think she has the ability to, even though she’s six. She has a great admiration for my players, really likes to be around them, but you know, you still have to have this killer instinct. And right now, she’s one of the sweetest kids I know! So I’m not sure if I see that yet. But I’ll wait till she’s maybe 9 or 10 before I can answer that question.

TNS: Hopefully most six year olds are like that! Something I’ve always wondered, and I think I have a general idea, but what do you talk about during a timeout?

DF: Well it depends. I mean, if you’re calling a timeout, it’s probably to break momentum on the other side. If they’re calling timeout, we’re probably preparing for what we think they might continue to do in that rotation or what they might try to put in as a wrinkle. If we’re calling timeout, it’s some adjustment, but for the most part, we don’t do things a ton differently. We just maybe try to open up their (her players’) vision because most of the time when we have troubles it’s because our vision narrows and we don’t quite take in all the cues that give us the answers to the problems, so we open up their vision.

TNS: About those adjustments, one of the matches this weekend, against Seattle Pacific, was pretty competitive in the first set and pretty lopsided in the second two. Can you take credit for the adjustments that might have been why that happened?

DF: No, I’ve got three other people on the bench to take credit for that, I just get to be the one that says it. But there’s adjustments all the time. There’s a lot that you can watch on film, but that might be dependent on who they’re playing rather than their common style of play, so there’s always adjustments. The first game against SPU was tight, a lot of that was sitting on our own shoulders because we made a lot of errors. And the good thing about that is it’s completely within our control. Basically once we settled down a little bit, and took control of the things we could control, we did okay.

TNS: Do you spend a lot of time watching volleyball just as a fan? Were you watching the Olympics, maybe beach volleyball?

DF: Oh, I watch all volleyball! It gets tiresome at my household. Right now, I’ve probably got like eight recordings going on with the Pac-12 Network going, and the Big Ten Network, and ESPN2, and ESPNU, a lot of recordings. I just like watching the game — if I can pick up one nugget or two just from watching a match that I can apply to my team, that can make me a better coach, and help my players out.

TNS: Do you see yourself staying at WWU long-term? I’m sure the call of Division I has got to be a siren song.

DF: I like where I’m at. I’ve always said that my professional life will never override my personal life. My personal life comes first. I want to keep my kid in school. I like the Bellingham schools system, I like living in Bellingham. And there’s lots to be done here. Even if we win a national championship here someday — I want another one! And there’s great support, great people. Division I lure….I’m not quite sure what is so shiny on the other side. It’s just a shiny penny that people are looking at. I’m not sure what it is. I’ve seen the coaching carousel spin after every season because someone wins or loses. I kinda like just being able to coach, knowing that I’m feeding my family and that we’re in a great spot that we love to live in. So I’m pretty content. There’s not this aspiration to go bigger, because I think we do pretty good here.

TNS: Lastly, Coach Flick, I wanted to give you the opportunity to brag a little bit.

DF: Oh, I don’t like to do that!

TNS: But what exactly has led you to be so successful here? You’ve had a remarkable record.

DF: I don’t know, to be honest with you. I don’t know that there’s any kind of magic or secret to it. One of the things I try to instill in my players is just getting a comfort with yourself. They know I’m always honest with them, I’m up front with them, I make decisions for the right reasons. Or at least the right intent. And with that, I think it encourages kids to come here, because they know what they’re gonna get. And as far as coming to Western, they get a good education out of it, too, and I don’t have to sell that.

So I don’t know. I’m not quite sure. I just feel like the kids that come here are the right fit in so many different ways. It’s not that just that they play good volleyball, but they do well in school, so I don’t have to worry about them. They do well socially. They get surrounded by enough people to where even in bad times they feel supported, and so there’s not a lot of transferring or leaving. There’s a good community feel. Continuity is so huge when you have a program like this. (Assistant coach) James (Suh) has been with me forever, speaking of continuity with coaching, you know what you’re gonna get.

TNS: It’s all about setting up the right culture, then.

DF: Yeah.

TNS: Well Coach, thank you for your time today, and best of luck the rest of the season.

DF: Thank you.