“Behind every great team there’s a great coach.”
This saying never gets old.
We’d like to take this opportunity to congratulate Coach Kiraly for leading Team USA to win its first ever World Championship Crown in women’s volleyball. He did wonders for this team since he took over as the head coach last year.
After winning the crown, here’s what Coach Kiraly told the press:
We came here to make history and we made it. It was a tough battle. I would like to congratulate Lang Ping and her team. They played a marvelous tournament. After we got a 2-0 lead we knew China would never give up. It was a battle to the end and they have some great young players, as do we. I hope that we will be playing against each other in the future. It is just good for the sport to have teams with such history performing at a high level.
It is not about my CV, it is about this team and this program. They are a wonderful group of people that I get to work with every day. I think one of the things is that we got contributions from every single player. It was not just our starting six. That helped us be rested and have more energy at the finish when we got to use players like Tori Dixon and Rachel Adams, the other middles and Kelsey Robinson and Kristin Hildebrand the other outsides. Our other libero Nicole Davis, I am sure I am forgetting people but we got to use lots and lots of people. Every set Courtney Thompson and Nicole Fawcett came in and gave a little rest to our setter and opposite combination Alisha Glass and Kelly Murphy. All of that combined helped give us enough energy to finish strong at the end.
Kimberley Hill has improved tremendously. She is a world-class player in so many of her skills and she’s only been with this team two years, two seasons. Last summer and this summer. She can still get much better so we are excited about her future and her future with USA. This is a good start.
It feels really good, it’s awesome. I am so proud of these people I work with in this program every day. The 50 athletes who wore a USA uniform this year at some point and all the contributions they made and make on a daily basis. All of our staff, I have an amazing staff and we put it all together. Everybody did an amazing job so we are blessed to have such a quality group of people to work with.
In case you didn’t know, the 53 year old won 2 Olympic gold medals in indoor volleyball (1984 & 1988), Olympic gold medal in beach volleyball (1996), World Cup gold (1985) and Word Championship gold (1986) throughout his career as an athlete.
We’d also like to share this new way to celebrate when you win and it’s called…
#KARCHING
(images: FIVB)
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