"Setting" the standard: Mick Haley has USC's women of troy at the top of their game.

COACH: When and how did you become interested in volleyball?

HALEY: I grew up in Angola, Indiana and we thought our lives revolved around basketball. But by the time I got to Ball State University, I believed I was going to play baseball. I went there because my cousin was there. Merv Rettemund, the former Baltimore Orioles outfielder, was there and Jim Davis, of Garfield comic fame, was my fraternity brother.

We were on the quarter system. The first quarter I went out for the basketball team and didn't make it. I then began competing in intramural sports and enjoyed them very much. I was playing intramural basketball when Don Shondell, the intramural director, told me that I wouldn't score in the next game.

I went out to show him differently, but I didn't score for three quarters. What he didn't tell me was that I was being guarded by one of the volleyball players who had played on his Muncie Central High state championship team.

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One thing led to another and I think I displayed some poor sportsmanship, because my grade went from an A to a C overnight. So I had to go out for the volleyball team to show [Shondell] that I was a good guy.

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He tried to run me off. He had me do push-ups and sit-ups on the racquetball court. That was a lot easier than trying to play volleyball.

COACH: You became a setter at Ball State and in 1964-65 you helped lead the team to successive Midwest Intercollegiate Volleyball Association titles. What kind of player were you?

HALEY: Pretty feisty. I thought I had to be more aggressive, and began running up walls to save a ball or slap guys on the butt to get them to compete:

After my junior year, I felt that we were on the edge of breaking down some barriers in the sport to make it more athletic. When Don Shondell, our coach, went on sabbatical for his Ph.D. at Indiana U, he made me the player coach. It was kind of a breakout year for me.

COACH: At what point did you discover that coaching was in your blood? Who were your mentors?

HALEY: I had always felt that I was going to become a coach, but I just didn't know what I was going to coach.

I've had great coaches from the time I was in Little League. When I was 8-years-old, I begged to play on the Fire Department Sox because I wanted to play for Ross Butler. He was a teacher at Tri-State College who systemized his practices. That's where I learned about coaching and organizing things.

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I also had great coaches all through high school.

The most fun I had was in my sophomore year at Angola High when I coached a Little League team. They gave me a group of kids that nobody wanted. When we wound up with more kids than we could put on the teams, the town started a new league. They got five fathers to coach the other teams, but they couldn't find anyone to coach the sixth team. I agreed to do it.

After they drafted players for the first five teams, I got the leftovers. My first year we went 0-10, the second year 4-6, the third year 6-4, and the fourth year 10-0, when most of the kids were 12.

That experience showed me that if you stay with your kids and teach them properly you can accomplish anything. I used the same principles that my Little League coach had taught me, particularly on how to organize the practices.

Besides Don Shondell and Ross Butler, I would have to add a third mentor, Jim Coleman. He coached at George Williams College, now defunct, and was the 1968 Olympic coach. He's in the volleyball Hall of Fame.

COACH: You have guided the USC women to consecutive NCAA championships (2002-03) in three short years. Your last team was generally considered the nation's most talented team. It posted a perfect 35-0 record--only the fourth team ever to accomplish the feat. What has been the secret to your success in such a relatively short time?

HALEY: It's a couple of things. We have had an exceptionally group of players, our coaching staff is extremely dedicated, and the 2000 Olympic experience gave me an opportunity to see volleyball is played all around the world.

We incorporated a number of those concepts into some of the styles we played, which maybe caught some people a little off-guard. At least it gave us more of an innovative approach to how to improve our players.

Before we started the trend in the U.S., volleyball teams usually played with one setter. We decided to play with two and to substitute two attackers in the front row for the setters, so that we always had three attackers.

That's called the 6-2 system. Many of the teams in the U.S. always played a 5-1. When the rules changed from regular score to rally score, it became a sprint to win the game and the side-out game disappeared because of the rules change.

So the way we played matched-up with the new scoring system. And I think we were a little ahead on how to max out under the new rules.

Basically, it's been organization, hard work, and university support. USC brought us in to win championships, and gave us all the tools we needed from the standpoint of budget, scheduling, and support. The USC alumni have a long tradition of doing well in volleyball. When we rekindled the USC spirits, they came out in droves to support us.

COACH: How were you able to meld your philosophy and methodology with a tradition-rich program?

HALEY: SC won back-to-back national championships twice in the 70's and 80's--in 1976-77 and 1980-81. There was a little drought for about five or six years, although the teams had shots at doing well.

Then there was a coaching change. SC brought in Lisa Love from UT-Arlington to rebuild the program after a watering down of the talent. She did an exceptional job of returning it to prominence. But getting over the hump was difficult, especially after she took on the responsibility of being the primary women's administrator as well as the volleyball coach.

She had to rely on her assistant coaches to do a lot of the training and detail work while she was trying to run five or six women's sports plus her own. In the late '90s, she became exasperated at not being able to do as well as she had hoped in both areas and decided to focus on administration.

In some ways, that has enabled the program to become stronger. You now can go into the office and talk your sport with a person who knows exactly what you're talking about. We had a relationship from the past and got along well. And she opened a lot of doors sooner than would have been the case at other schools. She also cut down on my learning curve. That's been a real plus.

COACH: Do you believe in adapting the players to the system or having the system adapt to the players?

HALEY: We actually have adapted the system to our players. We're going to change it again this year to match up with the kind of players we're bringing in. I've recruited players to fit the system. Quite honestly, I like that.

But there are rarely enough elite athletes to guarantee a good share of them for your system every year. If you want a chance to win ever year, I believe you have to be flexible, be able to change, and provide good teaching and leadership in different systematic approaches to max out the abilities of your players.

If you're not flexible, everyone will learn how to play against you and use their preparation time to make themselves better, rather than to prepare for you.

COACH: What kind of offensive and defensive formations do you use?

HALEY: We do some different things. Offensively, in the past, we've been 6-6, 6-5, 6-3 across the net. So we've tried to play big. We want to use our block to intimidate the opponents. We want to play great defense. And always get a good swing at the pins, if we can, because the highest percentage is to hit at the antennas.

But we have to be adept at running the middle to get the 1-on-1 situations at the antennas. Ball-control is essential for that, as well as passing.

Our defensive concept has been kind of a breathing defense. I call it a flex defense. It incorporates all the defenses everybody else plays, but adjusts the defense to the particular player we are defending. It collapses on the ball.

Our transition game relies on always getting a good swing. Our defense really sets up our transition offense. In our serve-receive offense--passing the ball off of the serve--we try to have a lot of movement, always get a good swing, and try to be as quick as we can without cutting down on our efficiency.

COACH: How frequently do you make changes in floor personnel to combat what the opponents are doing?

HALEY: Not very often. It is not so much changing personnel. It's more changing position or the way we defense the person. We will rotate the match-ups, and we'll change in that way, before we substitute. Rotation is more of an option than substitution.

There are only two reasons to substitute and the good coaches and good teams follow this rule. One is to improve the performance of the team. The other is to give someone else a chance to play. You never use substitutions as a penalty.

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COACH: Including USC, you have won at every place you have coached: Leading the U. of Texas to 13 Southwest Conference, 15 NCAA berths, and two national crowns (1981 AIAW and 1988 NCAA) during your 17-year tenure, in addition to guiding the men's and women's programs at Kellogg Community College in Battle Creek, MI, to six national junior college championships, between 1973-79. What are the keys to building and maintaining a high-level program?

HALEY: It is the deployment of your personnel, as in football. All those football coaches can X and O with you, then focus on the skills and techniques that enable the players to compete. In short, equip them with the tools that will enable them to put their hearts into going after the opponent.

The Final thing is the team concept. Or maybe it's the first thing. In every one of the programs I've been involved with, I go back to my Little League coaching days and that 0-10 team.

We might have been 0-10, but we were a team. The end result was that four years later we were 10-0. That always taught me that no matter what--you have your team, you work, you keep improving, and you don't worry about wins and losses.

It's like what John Wooden said. He never emphasized winning. He always emphasized execution. He was so right about that, because that's how you win.

A lot of people don't get it, even in the pros. They all say that winning is everything. Execution is everything.

You have to work together, especially in volleyball. It's a rebound sport. You can't catch it and throw it. You can't take it and go coast to coast. It requires three people touching the ball. So you really have to be a team.

COACH: The 1988 U. of Texas squad was the only non-West Coast team to win an NCAA title until 1995. Can a program in the Midwest, Southeast, or East duplicate the Texas feat in what is clearly a West Coast-dominated sport?

HALEY: Monopolies are over. When we did it, that meant anyone could do it. You now see talent everywhere. Florida finished second last season. Minnesota was in the Final Four. There was a time a couple of years ago when no West Coast teams made the Final Four. Everything is possible now. It just depends on how hard the kids want to work and how hard the coaches work to maintain their talent bases.

I think right now you are seeing a very nice balance of power. The Big 10 is having a resurgence. The ACC is picking up. Only the Southeast Conference seems to be lagging. Florida is carrying the SEC, but that's only because their coaches have made a commitment to work extra hard to be competitive.

Interview by Kevin Newell