Dan Buehring’s volleyball-playing profession was not essentially motivated by a drive to succeed, however quite by a need to overcome his grinding worry of failure.
Deep introspection, an instructional’s perspective and a wholesome dose of “we versus me” comradeship helped Buehring break into major attracts of AVP seashore tournaments, and finally planted the seeds that made him completely suited to his current occupation:
NCAA Division III males’s volleyball coach.
Buehring’s deep and close-knit Stevens Institute of Technology crew final month put an exclamation point on a 35-3 season by successful the D-III title, topping North Central College in 4 units within the championship match.
Over three seasons on the nationally famend personal engineering faculty in Hoboken, New Jersey, instantly throughout the Hudson River from Manhattan, Buehring has received 87.2% of his matches (75-11). A training street much less traveled has proved to be a journey to final success for Buehring and his squad of self-starting brainiacs.
Interestingly, the Ducks’ 37-year-old coach grew up within the western Chicago suburbs of Naperville (the place North Central’s campus is situated) and Lisle, dwelling of Benedictine University. Buehring launched the lads’s D-III indoor volleyball program at Benedictine, teaching there from 2015 to 2020 earlier than taking the Stevens job.
During his days of battling as a Midwestern outsider to interrupt the proverbial glass ceiling of the AVP major draw — with severe intent from 2014 to 2018 — Buehring and his associate (and “very best friend in the world” since their membership days at Sports Performance), Matthew McCarthy, skilled recurrently on Chicago’s Oak Street Beach. A gleaming sliver of quartz sand nestled between Lake Michigan and the bustling Magnificient Mile, Oak sees shadows from the 100-story John Hancock Tower and Lake Shore Drive high-rises forged upon it throughout summer time afternoons.
And it simply occurs to be my dwelling sand, so I witnessed first-hand the tireless work ethic of those beautifully expert, personable and well-spoken younger athletes.
The 6-foot-3 Buehring and the 6-8 McCarthy (the 2015 AVCA nationwide males’s assistant coach of the 12 months at Lewis University in suburban Romeoville) figuratively poked their heads and shoulders by way of that tumbler ceiling, however had been unable to constantly put their toes solidly on it. Their most notable success got here, fittingly, on the sand of Oak Street Beach through the 2016 AVP Chicago match, after they superior to the second day of competitors with a winners-bracket victory over the Thirteenth-seeded crew and topped the 14 seeds within the comfort bracket to complete Thirteenth.
To illustrate how shut Buehring and McCarthy had been to cracking the “Elite 16” (the home tour had reduce its typical fields from 32 to 16 after reorganizing from its 2010 chapter), they had been crushed within the remaining rounds of AVP qualifiers seven occasions through the 2014, ’15, ’16 and ’17 seasons, one elusive win away from major attracts.
Lessons realized from enjoying seashore
During a wide-ranging dialog with him, Buehring turned inward in reflecting on his seashore profession, which was pockmarked by extra situations of deep frustration than pleasure, and spoke passionately on how coping with these setbacks made him a greater coach. Coaches usually don’t speak about failure, however Buehring has made {that a} key side of his unconventional go-to mantra. The genesis of his strategy sprang from a realization as a participant “my body was way more fit than my mind.”
“I just loved beach volleyball. I loved the friendships. I love that [the sport] is so difficult. I love that you have to have mental and emotional discipline. I love that it teaches you things about yourself,” Buehring mentioned in a machine-gun-like burst. “There are zero excuses (in seashore doubles), nowhere to cover. What cracked Matt and I into the AVP was a development mindset … and failure … and iteration. We informed ourselves that we have to be extra within the second, and I informed myself that I wanted to cope with my anxiousness in regards to the consequence of the match that was seeping into execution in the mean time.
“A lot of really great research was out there on performance. We started to look at that, and I dove into even deeper. There is this list of factors that are the best practices in high performances in any field, and for me the application was beach volleyball. Then I developed this passion that I could share this knowledge with the Benedictine teams I coached at the time.”
Buehring set his sights on getting a level to turn into a therapist, “because I wanted to help people with their problems. I figured that while I was at Benedictine I could get this (education) paid for, for free, and I’ll do this (coaching job) for a while. It will be fun and it allows me to train and play (beach volleyball) all summer. During that time I did (the work) over half of that degree to become a clinical psychologist. Meanwhile, I just fell in love with coaching.”
His analysis into the psychology of sports activities precipitated Buehring to see even deeper into his vulnerabilities.
On that aforementioned record of efficiency components, “foremost is the ability to be in the moment and to breathe. Another is to be committed to your skills and your body. I was doing a lot of (cross-training), with my goal to be the biggest, strongest, fastest guy out on the beach, which is a hard goal,” he mentioned. “It was a couple of sound thoughts in a sound physique, however my physique was far more match than my thoughts. I wanted to settle myself down between the ears. I realized that the deal is to bop along with your demons – your detrimental ideas – tuck them into mattress and say that you simply’re tremendous. Not that they should go away, it’s about being OK with your self.
“What the game does under pressure is that any of your negative stories about yourself will sabotage you in that moment. So (athletes) need to learn the techniques to put your attention on the right things, the fundamentals. If my commitment is to my teammate – for me that was Matt, for these guys, it was their teammates at Stevens – if my commitment is that I care about you more than anything, then you subordinate your personal issues for performance in the moment.”
I famous to Dan that these sound like rules taught to troopers in fight, to which he replied that his “favorite performance psychologist is from West Point. I emailed him as soon as I got back on Monday and wrote, ‘You don’t know me, but I read your book and it won us a national championship.’ Applying (those principles) for him meant saving lives. For me, it’s about winning volleyball games, but ultimately in service of the players’ life beyond. If (these young men) can get over their inadequacies and start to see their adequacies, if not power, that’s the actual point we were expressing in this national championship.”
Buehring flipped it again round to the apex of his pro-beach profession, that particular Labor Day Weekend in 2016 on the acquainted sand of Oak Street Beach. Dan and Matt had developed a fan base by way of their successes in native tournaments and supporters ringed the outer courts two and three deep for his or her matches.
“When Matt and I broke through (into the main draw of the AVP), that was just us breaking through our personal barriers,” he mentioned. “We had a spot in that field without even being in the ‘Q.’ Then we won multiple matches and were playing on Saturday at home, in front of our friends, in front of the Chicago volleyball community that had supported us, and what happened (between the partners) was clarity. I love you. You love me. We love volleyball.”
Did Buehring have regrets that his exhausting work and frequent psychological anguish didn’t end in extra tangible rewards than profession AVP earnings of $2,750 and finest finishes of Thirteenth (twice)? Certainly. But he understood his life priorities and walked away from the tour at an applicable time.
“When we would finish on a Saturday I saw that this was our ceiling unless we wanted to move to the South Bay (in California), Hermosa and Manhattan and start training,” Buehring admitted. “I didn’t need to try this. I loved teaching an excessive amount of. I liked the Midwest. I may see that, at finest, it will be 5 to seven years of creating like $18,000 a 12 months simply to see that subsequent tiny increment of enchancment.
“While I had some good years athletically left in me, I knew my place. I knew my station. Yes, there is a part of me that says, ‘I wish I would have played in the 1990s, with 32-team draws. If I had just been younger, I would have played in the main draw every time.’ But overall, yeah, I felt I had been successful and could move on.”
Dan Friend, the extremely embellished males’s indoor coach at Lewis, skilled and coached Buehring and McCarthy on the seashore. Friend mentioned that he was “super proud” of what his former pupil has achieved at Benedictine and at Stevens. He referred to as Dan “highly cerebral and meticulous in his preparation. He placed a great emphasis on his fitness, studied the videos, paid great attention to the details.”
Friend acknowledged that battling by way of his innate anxiousness had been Buehring’s fixed problem, however he mentioned that have “puts him in an ideal position to relate to many of the highly intellectual D-III athletes he coaches.” McCarthy, after 9 seasons working with Friend at Lewis and 5 years because the affiliate head coach at Loyola Chicago, is the boys director and recruiting coordinator for Pipeline Volleyball Club within the western Chicago suburbs.
The bonds of deep friendship that Buehring cast with McCarthy and different seashore companions, and that record of high-performance practices had borne fruit. From failure after failure had come achievement. Buehring used these as a template to show his start-up Benedictine program right into a crew within the high 5 of the AVCA D-III nationwide ballot by 2018, reaching No. 3 through the 2019 season.
Making the transfer from dwelling to Stevens
When Stevens got here calling, Buehring was required to make a quick resolution, however he had few hesitations in regards to the job, regardless that it meant leaving his Chicago-area roots.
“It was in the middle of COVID. I had to show up to Stevens really quick,” mentioned Buehring, who labored as assistant within the girls’s indoor volleyball applications at Illinois-Chicago (2009-12) and Loyola-Chicago (2012-14). “I used to be supplied the job in late December (of 2020) and so they had been going to do a fraction of a season (that began in March) navigating round COVID.
“Yes, it was exhausting to depart the individuals and the relationships at Benedictine. The (athletic) division was nice, the younger males had been wonderful. We had achieved lots collectively, and emotionally it was extraordinarily tough. But professionally, it wasn’t as powerful, as a result of I knew I used to be going to a top-caliber program with actually nice help at the most effective tutorial establishments that hosted D-III males’s volleyball.
“So for me, it was a dream position. I told myself that I was going there to win national championships and do it the right way. Teach these young men about what’s coming their way in life, the character they have to build awesome lives for themselves. And if they’re as smart as I hear they are, then we’re probably going to do some pretty extraordinary things in our time.”
Buehring inherited a program at Stevens with built-in benefits. He changed Patrick Dorywalski, who constructed the Ducks right into a perennial small-college energy throughout his tenure from 1989 to 2019, which included seven journeys to the nationals and an NCAA D-III title in 2015.
Another nationwide championship, Buehring mentioned, could possibly be chalked as much as the Ducks’ deep roster and robust esprit de corps. Setter Louden Moran, a senior from Joliet, Illinois, Buehring’s former neck of the woods, was named the match’s Most Outstanding Player after dishing 40 assists and making 15 digs within the 25-15, 26-24, 15-25, 25-22 championship-match victory over North Central (25-4). Twelve gamers noticed court docket time for Stevens. Sophomore Koby Sherman had 16 kills and senior Percy Bickford added 11. On the street to the ultimate, the Ducks swept Geneva, defeated Wentworth in 4 units and swept Messiah.
“If you look at the depth that we played this year, we had two full different teams, and our ‘B’ squad was beating some incredible teams,” Buehring mentioned. “Our ‘B’ squad was winning in practice about 30-40 percent of the time, that’s how deep our squad was. We played our depth this year a lot, even in the national championship match. Some of our ‘B’ squad guys would be All-Americans elsewhere.”
Division III applications award no athletic grants. A deep thinker in his personal proper, Buehring appears an ideal match to develop the non-scholarship athletes at a “brain school.”
“What’s amazing about the D-III level that I can’t talk enough about is these young men are not getting paid anything to do this,” he mentioned. “They’re doing this as a result of they find it irresistible. They need to be there. These guys are extremely motivated apex predators. I didn’t all the time discover that to be the sentiment with the Division I girls’s groups I coached. Largely they had been, however there have been a lot who complained that they had been burned out and simply didn’t find it irresistible anymore.
“The guys’ enormous ardour makes my job simple, as a result of they’re excessive power and so they’re engaged. When you’ve got individuals this good — we’re a extremely excessive tutorial caliber faculty — you’ve got this large asset to work with as a coach, which is their mind. We give lots of our management stuff over to the gamers and I inform them that the authorship and the possession is yours.
“The first question I ask is, ‘What do you want your college experience to be like?’ Let’s go through this journey in an authentic way, and by the way, you are going to be the leader. I am just going to mentor you. What happens is that you get 10 ‘X’ the effort out of them.”
While not moved by any nice wanderlust, Buehring did simply add a nationwide championship to his teaching resume. In a more-high profile sport than males’s volleyball Buehring probably could be on a brief record of potential “hot hires.” But Dan appears content material in a state of affairs he refers to as a “Goldilocks zone.”
“After living in Chicago all those years, I was ready for Hudson River Valley, mountains, ocean nearby, one of the most incredible cities on your front door, literally. The views on-campus are crazy,” Buehring mentioned. “That view alone is a terrific recruiting instrument.
“Long story short, I’m extremely happy here. This is a pinnacle job for me and I’d like to be here for a while, I’d like to (win national titles) multiple times. Stevens is a place where the formula is ready to go, you just need an organized coach who can put it all together. When it comes to professional stuff, if you have a job like I have, you need to be really grateful.”
