What is it about Santa Barbara and volleyball?
Whether it’s success in the indoor game or on the sand around the globe, there always seems to be a Santa Barbara connection involved. The latest case is Sunday’s NCAA Women’s Volleyball Championship match in Kansas City between Texas A&M and Kentucky.
The coach for Texas A&M is UC Santa Barbara alum Jamie Morrison.
This week, the 2002 graduate in business economics was named the American Volleyball Coaches Association’s Division 1 National Coach of the Year. He’s led the 28-4 Aggies to their first-ever national final in his third year at the helm.
Initially, coaching wasn’t on Morrison’s career radar. But a blip started to emerge after the former Laguna Beach High standout athlete was cut from the UCSB men’s volleyball team and then asked by legendary women’s coach Kathy Gregory to become a practice player and a volunteer assistant for her squad.
During his time on Gregory’s staff (1999-2003), he learned the new computer program Data Volley, a volleyball statistical software that helps with scouting and analysis of all game situations.
This was his springboard into the coaching world.
“I always tell young coaches, whenever they ask me about my path: ‘Get really good at things that people can’t live without, and put yourself in the best environment you can,’’’ he told Matias Raymaekers, the founder of the volleyball site Volleybrains. “For me, that was learning Data Volley. The assistant I was working with, Liz Towne-Gilbert, changed my life. She ended up taking an assistant coach job at the University of Southern California. They called and said, ‘Hey, before you get into the business world, we’ll pay for your MBA.’ And I was like, ‘I can’t turn down a free MBA.’ So I went to USC.”
He was at USC for two years before connecting with Team USA coach Hugh McCutcheon.
“That same skill set kind of put me in that position, and then it put me down this path,” he told Volleybrains. “I knew I wanted to coach. It was this game that I love. It was mentoring young people to go be great at something and teaching them to love the game that I love.”
That love affair propelled him into jobs with Team USA. He was part of three Olympic medal-winning squads: gold with the men in Beijing (2008), and silver and bronze with the women in London (2012) and Rio de Janeiro (2016).
He was smitten with the international game and got the opportunity to coach the Netherlands women’s national team for three years (2017-19). He led them to a silver-medal finish at the 2017 European Championships and a fourth-place result at the 2018 World Championships.
Morrison also coached the U.S. U19 women’s team and holds an unblemished 24-0 record and has won multiple gold medals.
His college coaching experience includes stints at Irvine-Concordia (2006-2008), UC Irvine (2012-13) and Texas (2020-2021) before taking the reins at A&M.
Once Morrison arrived at College Station, senior libero Ava Underwood had a strong feeling things were going to get a lot better in the program.
“When he took the job, it was not a question in my mind that I was going to stay,” she said in a press conference before the national semifinals. “I knew that he was the guy that could make this place a great place for volleyball and just for people to go to, and that was something that I wanted to be a part of. It didn’t take much convincing for me.”
Morrison’s AVCA Coach of the Year award marks the sixth time a women’s indoor volleyball coach with Santa Barbara ties has been honored. Pitt’s Dan Fisher, a Dos Pueblos alum, was last year’s winner. Fisher guided Pitt to its fifth straight Final Four this year and lost to Morrison’s Aggies, 3-0.
The other winners include UCSB alum Dave Shoji, with Hawai’i in 1982, Don Shaw, a UCSB alum and former Gaucho assistant coach, with Stanford in 1991, UCSB’s Kathy Gregory in 1993, Shawn Olmstead (Carpinteria) with BYU in 2014 and Heather Olmstead (Carpinteria) with BYU in 2014.