Casey Patterson’s first experience with volleyball was walking onto the Newbury Park High School gym for tryouts at the behest of his mother more than 25 years ago.
He watched in awe as head coach Kevin Judd, now the coach at California Lutheran University, soared through the air and hammered big hits into the hardwood alongside the prospective Newbury Park players he was putting through drills.
Patterson was floored.
“It was the perfect moment to spark something that I didn’t even know existed,” Patterson remembered. “Then, it becomes a lifelong career and passion.”
Now, after an illustrious professional volleyball career that took him all the way to the 2016 Olympic Games as a member of Team USA’s beach volleyball team, Patterson has walked back into that same gym as the boys head coach.
“To be back is this full-circle moment for me,” Patterson said.
It is Patterson’s first high school coaching job since he retired from the sport in 2022, but the Olympian is hardly a novice in the coaching ranks.
While in college at Brigham Young University, he coached at Pleasant Grove High School in Utah. In the 2010s, he was an assistant coach for the boys and girls volleyball programs at Mater Dei in Southern California. He has long coached with Gold Medal Squared, a premier training program that puts on summer volleyball camps.
Patterson has taken the reins from longtime Newbury Park boys coach Jorge Ostrovsky, who led the program for 25 years until his retirement after the spring season.
The biggest goal Patterson has is to make the Newbury Park volleyball court a source of joy that is timeless for his players.
“We get to kind of live in Neverland. When we are done, we are back to real life, we have got to go back to school, we have got to go back to work, but for now, we get to be the Lost Boys on an adventure,” Patterson said. “If we have a road map and the system in place, we get to be unstoppable.”
Patterson is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to former local players returning home to coach their alma maters in Ventura County — especially in girls volleyball.
Patterson believes former players are drawn back to Ventura County to coach due to the quality of players in the region and the instinct to help grow the game that gave them so much.
“They are coming back to share what they have been able to (learn), going on their journey in the game, the sport they started, usually, in high school,” Patterson said. “With volleyball, a lot of us had such good experiences that it is like, ‘Look, it is time to give back here.’ ”
Full circle is the phrase many in the area’s newest group of volleyball coaches use to describe their situation.
Del Sol girls volleyball head coach Sierra Moore was a standout at Rio Mesa, where she got her start as a coach before taking over at Del Sol for the program’s first varsity season this fall.
Madison Dominguez, another graduate with the Class of 2016, played her high school volleyball as a libero at Thousand Oaks. She is now the head coach at Moorpark.
Brooke Bunker was a setter and a libero for Simi Valley. The 2021 graduate who also coaches club volleyball and assists with Moorpark College’s indoor and beach volleyball programs is back in the Pioneers’ gym as head coach this fall.
“I don’t think I have been back to Simi since graduation day. The gym smells the same, everything is the same,” Bunker said. “It’s been kind of awesome.”
Alexis Baloyo and Amaris Garcia were teammates at Ventura College, graduating together in 2022.
Both are now first-year head coaches back in Ventura County. Baloyo has taken over coaching duties at her alma mater, St. Bonaventure, while Garcia, a Ventura High alumna, is heading up the program at Buena, her former rival.
“Our generation has a different point of view than the coaches that coached us,” Garcia said. “It is this fresh mindset of, we know what worked and what didn’t work.”
Starting in the high school coaching ranks at the same time and both coaching club volleyball with LAVA Beach, Baloyo said the pair leaned on each other through the adjustment process.
“We were kind of living the same stresses at the beginning,” Baloyo said. “Having someone that is walking in the same shoes as me, around the same age as me, we both know each other on a deeper level because we were teammates and we are friends.
“It’s amazing to see everyone coming back to where it all started. Sports have shaped us. Now, it is our turn to keep growing the game.”
Dominic Massimino is a staff writer for The Star. He can be reached at dominic.massimino@vcstar.com. For more coverage, follow @vcsdominic on Twitter and Instagram.
This article originally appeared on Ventura County Star: Led by an Olympian, former players take over local volleyball programs
Reporting by Dominic Massimino, Ventura County Star / Ventura County Star
USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
