Men's Volleyball: Steady under Shweisky

When you go to a men’s volleyball game, you probably won’t see head coach Sam Shweisky yell or scream. The calm demeanor of Princeton’s new coach, who replaced the legendary Glenn Nelson this past year, belies his intensity and quiet confidence — hallmarks of Shweisky’s coaching style.

Shweisky, who secured the second win of his Princeton career against New York University on Tuesday, began playing volleyball in middle school. By his own admission, though, a career in the sport was one of the last places he thought he would end up.

“I started [playing the sport] in gym class when I was 12 and, to be honest, I wasn’t very good,” Shweisky said, laughing. “But I really enjoyed it, so I began going to summer camps and eventually fell in love with the sport. And at some point I started getting better at it.”

Shweisky took his love of the sport with him to Vassar College, where he played on the school’s varsity team in the Eastern Intercollegiate Volleyball Association — the same league in which Princeton plays. That connection was one of the things that drew Shweisky away from the University of Central Florida, where he coached until this year.

“That was one of the really incredible things about this job at Princeton,” he said. “I grew up playing schools like Princeton, Harvard and NYU when I was at Vassar. To come back to that — to have the chance to coach in the league where I was once an athlete — [is] just incredible. Plus, to be at an Ivy League institution, where academics and athletics could truly coexist and where you can make sure that your players have good experiences in both worlds — that wasn’t something I was going to pass up.”

Shweisky began his coaching career immediately after graduating from Vassar, serving for a year as an assistant coach at the University of New Haven. It would be a life-changing experience for him.

“When I first started coaching at New Haven, it wasn’t really my main gig,” he said. “I wasn’t making that much there so I was also substitute teaching on the side. I taught math, English, Spanish — just anything that I could. At some point during my year in Connecticut, though, I was teaching Spanish to some middle school kids and I realized that they just didn’t care [about learning the language]. There was no motivation. But when I got those same kids into the athletic arena, everyone was motivated. That’s when I started to realize what a great venue coaching was to teach kids the principles of applying yourself and staying hungry.”

Though he decided then that he would someday end up in coaching, Shweisky — then only 22 years old — wasn’t yet ready to give up his playing career.

“I was still pretty young,” Shweisky said. “When the team was playing, I would just be sitting on the bench, convulsing every time someone missed a shot. Coaching was great, but I just really wanted to play for a little while longer.”

Some of Shweisky’s friends let him know of a program that took a group of American volleyball players abroad to play matches against some of the top European club teams. After a 14-day tour, Shweisky was asked to play for a club team in Holland.

“My coach in Holland had been a national team coach at [the 2000 Summer Olympics]. He was a passionate guy, and I just learned more from him in that one year than I think I ever had before.”

A year later, Shweisky returned to the United States, more committed than ever to the sport. He became invested in the idea of volleyball as a community of one that would last a lifetime. It was an outlook that he would carry with him to Princeton.

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“The tournament we hosted — the Dillon Fall Classic — was something really important to me. I told [the members of the Princeton team] that day that they were ambassadors for volleyball and that it was a chance for them to develop a broader volleyball community with some players from the surrounding area. [The Tigers] were excellent hosts, making everybody feel welcome and at home. It was a lot of fun, but most of all it was a really great day for the sport.”

Even in the thick of the season, Shweisky still makes a concerted effort to maintain a feeling of community for all the members of Princeton’s volleyball program — not just its current players. The day before the team’s home opener against NYU, Shweisky invited five former Tigers — including former All-American Marin Gjaja ’91 and members of the 1998 EIVA championship team Derek Devens ’98 and Scott Birdwell ’98 — to practice with the team.

“Really, that was one of the greatest things about [the men’s team’s] trip to California,” Shweisky said, referring to the team’s three-game stop earlier this season. “The parent and alumni support was just outstanding. Everybody put so much time and effort into taking us around and hosting us, and a lot of the matches were just full of Princeton alums. The kind of community that exists out there is incredible.”

Though Shweisky had precious little time to adjust to his new role — he was hired in August and began practicing with the team just a few weeks later — he said he is pleased with how smooth his transition was.

“Any transition is going to be a little awkward. [Former head coach Glenn] Nelson had been here for 30 years and was basically an institution,” he said. “Things are going well, though. I’m very excited about the vibe we have going. I’m fired up.”