New Hornet Volleyball Coach Brings District Title Experience

In the Fall of 2006, Lee High School Head coach Rebecca Waters watched as the Herndon Hornets blew out her volleyball team in game-one of the Northern Regional quarterfinal, in what she called a “massacre." However, Waters called time-out and told her players, “you’ve come this far and the worst you can do is lose.”

The next two games played out quite differently as Waters’ two-time Patriot District Championship team made a phenomenal comeback against Herndon winning 3-1 to advance to the Northern Regional semi-final.

Now five years later, Waters has been hired to take the helm of the Hornet’s varsity volleyball team in hopes of accomplishing the greatness she had at Lee.

“We had a committee of three that interviewed the candidates and the committee seemed to believe that Rebecca would be the best candidate for the position,” Herndon High Athletic Director Mike Mahoney said in a phone interview Thursday afternoon. “We think that Rebecca, with her head coaching background and the fact she has won a couple of district titles when she was at Lee, seems to be a good fit for Herndon High School.”

Waters admires the hard work her predecessor Pat Smith put into building not only the high school program, but also the club level volleyball organizations in the Herndon area as a sort of feeder program into the high school level.

She said her previous teams at West Potomac and Lee had a couple of players at the most who had played at the club level before, so she is excited now to coach a team in which most of the players have had a good bit of club level experience.

This will be Waters’ 11th season coaching volleyball and she is excited about taking over the position Smith and Brad Wright held for so long.

“It’s great because I know both of them personally and they established a great program so you know you are not walking into a mess,” she said. “But then there are higher expectations to maintain that. Volleyball is more popular at Herndon at it is nice to have that type of program.”

Waters grew up in Sterling and played volleyball for Park View High School where she received honorable mention on the All-Met team in 1998.

While attending The University of Virginia, she chose to play for the school’s nationally ranked, club team, which her sister Cindy founded in 1994-95. She first became interested in coaching when asked to work as a counselor during the summer for the George Mason volleyball camps.

“I really enjoyed it. I have a knack for explaining things different ways and I knew I wasn’t going to teach and it was a nice fit where I could still coach without being a teacher.”

Then in 2001, during her fourth year at school she took a position coaching at Charlottesville City High.

“I loved it and when I graduated, the first thing I did before looking for a full time job was look for a coaching position.”

Hired in 2002 to coach the junior varsity team at Lee High School, Waters attained great success and took over as varsity head coach the following year where she would  lead her team to back-to-back Patriot district titles in 2005-06. She knew her team was small and always “the underdog,” yet they went undefeated in the Patriot district both years they won the title.

“It was nice to work with girls who understood we had the weaknesses and we had these strengths,” she said. “And we were going to play to our strengths and it was going to work.”

Waters said her proudest moment in her 10 years of coaching was the amazing comeback against Herndon in 2006 after the horrific first game loss.

“Herndon’s team was all really tall and we watched them warm up and the girls were like ‘uh oh.’” She said. “They looked really defeated and I just said ‘just go down swinging, be aggressive and don’t give them anything easy to work with, make them fight for it’ and we ended up winning.”

“That was probably one of the only games [where I coached]—I don’t do a lot of coaching during games, I don’t believe in it. I think coaching is for practice and in games they have to execute on their own.”

Waters treats her girls with maturity, gives instruction and develops each girl individually to better the team as a whole. She said many girls will play in college and coaches at that level expect you to know what you are doing and they may mot treat their players with kid gloves.

She believes her coaching philosophy helps better prepare a player for that college experience.

“So, when I let them loose, they need to know what to do,” Waters said. “If they make a mistake you stop and say ‘OK, that’s fine but how could we have done this differently and the next time you’re in this situation, what decision are you going to make. After you’ve been playing for a while, everything becomes automatic and you are not thinking.”

Waters has an open door policy with her players and said her players might be surprised at how easy she is to talk with about any issue. She plans on holding a meeting with her team as soon as next week to get to know each player and discuss how the program will run and the tryout process.

“If I see a freshman that has a lot of potential, I immediately start thinking ‘I want to take this girl now,” Waters said. “She probably wont play this year, she may get a little playing time next year, but she is going to be an all-district player her junior year.’ For me it is more setting goals for the individual players.”

Waters said she also plans on meeting with Smith to learn how she ran the program in the past.

“I will discuss with Pat how things were before and am certainly open to continuing [certain things]. I have a vision for my program and how I want it to be, but at the same time it is the [players] team, it’s their high school years and I want it to be enjoyable for them.”