One-on-One with HPU Volleyball Head Coach Ryan Meek
By Collin Giuliani// Sports Editor
The last time that the volleyball team at High Point University hired an assistant coach from Creighton, the results were, to say the least, fantastic.
Tom Mendoza coached the past two seasons and made it to the NCAA Tournament twice in that stretch. He finished his career winning 21 out of his final 22 games against Big South opponents. Last year, the Panthers won 29 consecutive sets at home to close out the season, and became the second school in conference history, alongside 2006 Winthrop, to not drop a set at home. And last year, HPU became the first school in the history of the Big South Conference (since 1986) to make the NCAA Tournament as an at-large.
Safe to say, the next man up has some pretty big shoes to fill. But Ryan Meek, the new head coach of the volleyball team, is up for the challenge.
In fact, he’s feeling pretty confident about where the team is heading.
“My biggest takeaway is that we’re pretty good,” said Meek. “When I took this job, I knew we were going to be pretty solid, but I’ve just been blown away by the athletes’ work ethic and their buy-in.”
This isn’t Meek’s first exposure to HPU. When former head coach Jason Oliver left after the 2015 season to become an assistant coach at Indiana, Meek threw his name into the ring. He got passed on for Mendoza, who was an assistant for six seasons at Creighton. So it’s no surprise that when Mendoza left HPU to take the head coaching position at South Carolina, Meek threw his name into the ring again.
This time, however, he got the job. And despite the fact that he and Mendoza were never on the same staff together at Creighton, he got a lot of advice from Mendoza along the way.
“I met Tom through the Creighton staff,” said Meek, “But when this job was opening up, I was thinking about whether to go for it or not, he was a really big help. He probably spent three or four hours on the phone with me, just helping me answering questions and talking through the team, the scheduling and what High Point was like. He was definitely a big help in the transitioning of it.”
Over the past two seasons at Creighton, Meek worked under head coach Kirsten Bernthal Booth, much like Mendoza did. At Creighton, Meek saw immediate success; in his first season, Creighton made it to the Elite Eight for the first time in school history, knocking off two nationally ranked teams (#five seed Kansas and #12 seed Michigan) along the way before falling to Texas. In his second season, Creighton finished the regular season ranked inside the top 10 in RPI, and even hosted multiple games in the NCAA Tournament.
“It was amazing,” said Meek on the Elite Eight run from 2016. “I think all year we knew we were a really good team but I think we were flying under the radar nationally. We were barely ranked in the top 25, if at all, going into the tournament, so nobody really expected us to go very far. But it was a fantastic experience because it was a wonderful group of people to work with.”
Much like Creighton, HPU has had NCAA Tournament experience in recent years, having made it to the tournament in each of the past two seasons. And with the same lingo and terms from Creighton that Mendoza used being used by Meek, and with a relatively experienced roster coming back (the team lost just two starters from last year, with Haley Barnes and Carly Jimenez), he has been able to hit the ground running.
“There’s a lot of experience,” said Meek with a laugh. “There’s a lot less tearing your hair out over freshman mistakes… the nice thing about coaching an older group is that you can come in and there’s more of a collaboration, whereas if you take over a team that hasn’t had success or is really young, you have to tell them how things are. I’ve been able to ask questions and get honest answers back.”
In fact, there’s been almost little to no adjustment period. Even though Meek is the third head coach in four years for the senior class (the rising seniors had Jason Oliver in their freshman year, Tom Mendoza in their sophomore and junior year, and Ryan Meek in their soon-to-be senior year), it’s been nothing but smooth sailing so far.
“I have to commend this group,” said Meek. “It’d be so easy for them with a new coach to say ‘hey, we’ve got this, we’ve got this handled.’ But they haven’t. They’ve been really open to coaching and really open to instruction. I think the nice thing taking over for Tom is that a lot of our systems and a lot of our terminology is the same. We weren’t having to explain a lot of things. We were able to hit the ground running… taking over for him was easy.”
As for his expectations for his first season as a head coach, besides winning? It’s a goal that most youth sports coaches strive for, and one that they would be proud of- make sure the girls are having fun and that volleyball doesn’t feel like a chore.
“Past [winning], making sure that the girls enjoy their experience is a big [goal],” said Meek. “15 years or so after they graduate, they’re going to remember the wins and losses and that were successful, but they’re going to remember the experience of what we did here… I want the girls to not just win on the court, but I want them to be happy off the court and love their time at High Point, and make sure that this is the best four years of their lives.”
HPU played seven Power-6 opponents in non-conference play, including Texas (ranked number two in the country) and Wisconsin (ranked number seven in the country), and highlighted the non-conference schedule with a 3-0 road victory against Villanova. Conference play began on Tuesday against USC Upstate, and the first home conference game of the year will be on Friday, Sept. 21, against Gardner-Webb.
New HPU volleyball head coach, Ryan Meek, is looking to take the Panthers back to the NCAA Tournament for the third consecutive season. Photo submitted