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Monday, December 1, 2008
Coach Tim Meserth
Raleigh Durham, NC
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Broughton High School Head Varsity Volleyball Coach
Tim Meserth brings enthusiasm to the Broughton High School Volleyball team. For Coach Meserth, coaching is his way of giving back to his community and participating in a sport he loves. Unlike most coaches, Meserth is not a teacher. He is an engineer with IBM, participating in coaching thanks to his company’s support of work/life balance for its employees. Broughton won the 2008 Cap 7 Regular Season Championship, sending a great group of seniors off to graduation on a high note. Meserth reflects on his championship season and his hopes for future seasons of great Caps Volleyball.
Looking back on your season, what has it meant to you to coach this team?
2008 has been a great year for Broughton Volleyball. I have never had a team that was as hard working and talented as this group of amazing young women. I have been working with these seniors for the last four years, ever since the first week in August of their freshman year. It has been great to watch them grow up from somewhat timid youngsters to the confident young women that they are today.
You went to the top in the Cap-7 regular season, but lost in the championship tournament. Discuss how tough that was and how you helped your team cope with the disappointment.
I was disappointed for the seniors. They have made it to CAP7 Tournament Championship every year of their career (twice as CAP7 regular season champions) but we haven’t managed to bring home the tournament trophy since 2005. In 2008 we had a great opportunity to bring home both trophies, but I have to give credit to Enloe. As a team, the Enloe players really came together and filled the hole in their rotation when Anna Moore injured her ankle. Veterans Elena Frac, Gabby Gilbert, and Jasmine Roseboro really stepped up their leadership and fought hard. Coach Green also got some great minutes out of his younger players like Jessica Clayburn and Elise Watson.
After the loss, I met quickly with the team and I told them that I was proud of them for making it to the CAP7 Championship for the fourth straight year. I reminded them all that no other CAP7 volleyball team has had that level of consistent success over the last four years. I also told them that we still had the number one seed going into the NCHSAA State Playoffs and we needed to forget about this loss and focus on Fuquay-Varina, our first round opponent.
How does your team look for 2009?
In a word, “different.” Losing the five Seniors in the Class of 2009 will be tough because these athletes have been the core of the team for the last three years. Molly Crenshaw was my first four year starter at Broughton. Jolonda Mitchell and Kaitlin Frey have been in the starting rotation since their Sophomore year. Alecia Westphalen and Madison Hilliard have both been part of the starting rotation during their Junior and Senior years. In 2008 we had a ton of depth, with a bunch of underclassmen ready to step in and play on the Varsity Squad if needed, but the team will look very different without Molly, Jae, Kait, Alecia, and Madison on the court.
That said, I expect Broughton Volleyball team to be tough to beat in 2009 because we were able to play a lot of the younger kids in Varsity matches this fall. Of the eleven returning athletes that earned varsity letters in 2008, ten of them are playing USAV this winter. This high school and club experience will help them hit the floor running in 2009. Returning Varsity letter winners include: Nicole Willis, who can literally take over a game at any time, playing on the right side; Sarah Frey at setter; Lorin Thomas, Mary Harrell, Claire Radford, and Ashlyn Sanders at outside hitter; Morgan Jones, Elizabeth Bialkowski, and Stephanie Pipkin at Middle Blocker, Gina Guzzo and Nikki Brustofski at Defensive Specialist.
You are different from many high school coaches because you are not a fulltime teacher. Describe your day job.
I am a Human Factors Engineer at IBM where I work on making blade server technology easy to use for our customers. I work with our customers to understand how they use our products and then work with our development engineers to make IBM’s servers easy to use. It is both challenging and a lot of fun. I get to work on a lot of ground breaking technologies and have the opportunity contribute to IBM’s intellectual property portfolio. My office is located at IBM’s “Main Site” in Research Triangle Park. IBM as a company is great at supporting work-life balance. During the three month long “fall season” I get into the office early so I can leave for practice early. I sometimes work a few hours on the weekend to keep up with the products I support.
How did you decide to get into coaching?
I have to blame two people for that: Tom Hilbert and my wife Nicole Meserth
My undergraduate degree was in Mechanical Engineering but in the early spring of 1994, I didn’t have a job lined up yet for when I graduated, so when the University of Idaho Head Coach Tom Hilbert asked me if I was interested in going to graduate school for free I jumped at the opportunity. To be honest, I was sort of a volleyball groupie as an undergraduate. I had been a setter on the University of Idaho men’s USAV club team and was a big fan of the program Tom and Melissa Stokes (his 1st assistant) had built at Idaho. During both my years as an Assistant Coach, Idaho was ranked in the top 20, won the Big Sky Conference regular season and tournament titles, and qualified for the NCAA Division 1 Tournament. It was a lot of work, but also a lot of fun. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to spend the forty-five hours a week necessary to coach (in the gym, in the office recruiting on the phone, or on the road evaluating high school players) and complete my Master’s Thesis in Psychology (Human Factors). So after two years, I gave up my assistantship and focused on completing my graduate degree.
I first became a high school coach by assisting my wife at Hillside Durham in 2000. She worked for Durham Public schools at the time and Hillside didn’t have a coach and it was already the middle of August. We co-coached there for three years and I really enjoyed working with the high school kids because there were so many things to teach them about the game of volleyball. You could literally watch the team get better day-by-day.
In 2003, Nicole moved on to a different job that didn’t have as flexible of a work schedule. That spring, I was offered the head coaching job at Broughton. Broughton is a fantastic place to coach at because of the strong community involvement and the support I get from AD Jack Spain, Assistant AD Mary-Beth Harvey, and the CAPS club.
What is the most satisfying part of coaching?
I really enjoy the opportunity to take raw athletic ability and, over the course of four years, turn it into something special on the volleyball court. Jolonda Mitchell, Alecia Westphalen, and Madison Hilliard are perfect examples of this metamorphosis. All three had played very little (if any) organized volleyball prior to coming to their freshman year at Broughton but they were all athletic and fairly tall. Alecia and Madison enjoyed volleyball so much that it became their sport in high school and they started playing USAV in the winter and spring. Jolonda only played volleyball during fall season and some of our summer workouts. We had to share her with her first love, basketball during the winter, and the track team in the spring. By their senior year the three of them as a unit gave Broughton one of the strongest and deepest groups of middle blockers in the state.
How do you strike a balance between your day job, coaching, and “having a life?”
To be honest, I haven’t done a great job of striking a balance. My wife, Nicole, is a volleyball widow from the beginning of August until the end of October. My daily schedule is: wake up, go to work, leave from work for practice or a match, complete the volleyball activity for the day, drive home from practice, spend a little time with Nicole and our dog Foster, and then go to bed. I also sometimes spend my “free” evenings watching a DVD of one of our matches to see what I need to fix in future practices. Unfortunately for Nicole, even when we are able to spend time together we usually end up discussing volleyball topics. As an engineer, I am good at fixing mechanics like approach footwork and arm-swing or the Xs and Os of volleyball, but I am still working on my ability to relate to and motivate teenage girls. She helps me understand how to phrase instructions better to get my point across while coaching.
Every now and then we go out to nice dinner on Saturday or Sunday evening to keep our “candle light factor” up.
Can you offer some words of wisdom for young volleyball players who want to succeed on the court?
Pain and fatigue are temporary, but championships and the friendships you build getting there last forever.
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