Volleyball coach Charita Stubbs finished up her second season with the team in a 3-0 loss to Miami on Friday, but she’ll have more to focus on than volleyball this offseason as she is expecting.
The coach’s due date for her child, which will be her first, is May 8. On Dec. 3 she will find out if she is having a girl or a boy.
“My husband wants me to take some time off because I’m pregnant now. And so it’s like, ‘You need to rest.’ So I just sleep in until 7:00 versus 6:00,” Stubbs said Monday. “And he thinks that’s rest for me. So it’s perfect.”
She said the time when she is expecting is “the ideal time to give birth if you are a volleyball coach.”
“May is our quiet period, and then June takes you into your little recruiting here and there and your camps and stuff like that,” Stubbs said. “It’s the best time.”
Stubbs will also be staying busy in other ways, as she said she is coaching a 16-and-under club volleyball team during the offseason. In addition, she said she’ll be looking for things she can do to help her program improve after a pair of winless ACC seasons.
“It’s kind of what I try to tell the players. You don’t get the luxury of having time off. I’ll have Christmas Day and some time around there when the NCAA gives us a dead period, which means I can’t do anything,” Stubbs said. “But I’ll still be working on things for the team because the reality is our season started today for next year.”
She said her players better understood their struggles this past season, but that plenty of work remains in that area.
“That’s been puzzling to me, how to make some players tougher when they feel as though that’s as tough as they need to be or that they actually think that they are tough or to make them better when they are possibly tapped-out athletically at this point,” she said.
Additionally, changing the atmosphere of a program that has won only one ACC match in the last six seasons has been harder than she thought it might be.
“I’m surprised at how hard it’s been to change the culture itself,” Stubbs said. “You bring in new players, new situation, but you get the same results because it’s so easy to fall into that trap of how things used to be.”
But she remains optimistic about what her team can do next season. Thirteen of her players this past season were freshmen or sophomores, and she said she expects all of her underclassmen to return.
She said assistant coach Kasey Harwell helped both her and the program in his first season. He was a good fit, she said, after she had split ways with Eduardo Fiallos after her first season.
“He has to think things through,” Stubbs said. “He has helped me because I have to slow down just a little bit to make sure that he understands exactly what I want.”
But even with her optimistic outlook, Stubbs said it will still be a little while before she schedules a match against her former boss, highly successful Arizona coach Dave Rubio, because of the need to have a better chance of getting early-season wins.
“It’s pushed back about another year just because things didn’t go as well as I anticipated in this ’07 class,” Stubbs said. “Reality is we have to be able to put some wins on the board because it helps with the confidence. It helps with the whole demeanor.”
Meanwhile, she said having veteran players next season that have extensive playing experience should help the team.
“You need players that have been through the war, that understand how to get it done on the floor so when that situation comes up again, I can look them in the face and say, ‘No, this is what used to happen, but it’s not going to happen now,'” she said.
