Heading into her 40th season, Saint Vincent women's volleyball coach Sue Hozak remains enthusiastic

A few lines of type. That’s what started Sue Hozak down the road to a long and distinguished coaching career at Saint Vincent.

Hozak has been at the helm of the Bearcats women’s volleyball team since its inception in 1985, and this fall, she begins her 40th season on the sidelines.

She has coached long enough to oppose her oldest daughter, Kristin Consuegra, who served as Chatham’s coach from 2010-11. (Mom was 4-0 in the series.) She has coached long enough that this season, for the first time, she will have the daughter of one of her former players on her roster.

Kim (Brozinski) Siwula played on the SVC women’s volleyball team that went to the NAIA Tournament in 1994. (That team subsequently went into the school’s athletic hall of fame.) Siwula’s daughter, Aubrey, a Ringgold grad, is one of 14 freshmen Hozak will have on her 2024 squad.

It might be fitting that her first child of a former player graduated from Ringgold. That’s where Hozak, a 1979 Norwin grad, began her coaching career after a standout run as a player at Waynesburg University (then College), which went to the NAIA Tournament three times during her career.

While she was coaching the Rams, she saw a newspaper ad stating Saint Vincent was looking for a coach to start its women’s volleyball program.

“And I was like, what the heck? Let’s see what happens,” she said.

What happened was a four-decade career that has resulted in 680 victories, six district/conference coach of the year honors and a 50-game winning streak during the 2006 season.

“Coach is definitely passionate about her job and passionate about the game, and I think I learned quite a bit from her,” said Kate McCauley, who played for Hozak and now serves as the Saint Vincent men’s volleyball coach. “When I was a player there my senior year, when I got hurt, I basically was a player-coach, so I got to learn a lot from her in that aspect.

“Now I go to her for any type of volleyball question I have. … She’s been like a second mother all through college, and now she’s like my work mom.”

Hozak grew up playing basketball and softball but decided to give volleyball a try when Norwin West started a junior high program. Hozak said her career path is the direct result of Title IX, which was passed in 1972 to expand opportunities for women and girls in athletics.

Girls volleyball was one of the sports many high schools across the country added to come into compliance with Title IX.

Hozak fell in love with it. She said she probably didn’t have the size or ball-handling ability to continue with basketball, and softball often left a player — even an infielder such as Hozak had been — with nothing to do for long stretches.

But with volleyball, she said, there was always something happening.

“You’re always involved in the action,” she said. “Without Title IX, I probably wouldn’t be where I am today. I got to play on the very first junior high team they had at Norwin. … We were really, really lucky to be at the right place at the right time.”

Hozak accomplished plenty as a player, including winning three PIAA titles with Norwin. But building a college team from scratch? That presented a whole other challenge.

Not only did she have no college coaching experience, at 23, she was only a year or two older than many of the players who would make up the inaugural Saint Vincent roster.

Fortunately, she found an ally in Kristen Zawacki. Zawacki had started the Saint Vincent women’s basketball program just two years before Hozak arrived to kick-start women’s volleyball.

“I had someone to talk to,” Hozak said about Zawacki, who died unexpectedly at 52 in 2010, “someone to talk about ideas, what was working for her. What could we take from her program and put into our program?”

That first team went 1-22, with the only win coming against La Roche. Hozak said she had only two players with high school volleyball experience. The rest simply were athletes who had been involved with other sports.

That calls to mind one of the biggest changes Hozak has seen in her sport: specialization.

“Ten or 15 years ago, you still had those athletes who played multiple sports, which good things can be said about both things,” Hozak said. “I think when you play multiple sports, you have different muscle groups that you’re using, and you learn something from every sport that you can take to the other sport.

“People that specialize, they just love that sport, and they decided that’s what they want to do. And I think that’s fine, too. It’s basically up to the individual.”

Game play also has changed. The two most notable shifts Hozak cited were the switch to rally scoring and the introduction of the libero a year earlier.

Rally scoring replaced side-out scoring — meaning a team could score only when it was serving — in 1999.

Initially, Hozak said, rally-score sets were played to 30. But it soon was apparent that playing sets to 30 wasn’t much quicker than the old side-out scoring, so sets were changed to 25 points.

This sped up matches and, Hozak said, made them more TV friendly.

The libero, meanwhile, expanded possibilities for coaches — “It allows you to have your best defensive player on the court at all times,” Hozak said — as well as opened doors for more players to participate. In volleyball, a libero may substitute for any player in the back row at any time, with the stipulation that she/he cannot contact the ball inside the 10-foot line.

This season, a further change. Now rules allow coaches to use two liberos, though not on the court at the same time.

“Maybe you have (one libero) who is really good at passing, and maybe you have someone who is really good at defense,” she said, “so you can switch those players in and out. That will be exciting.”

Asked if there was a team that stood out during her long tenure in Unity, Hozak hesitated to name one. She said each was special to her for different reasons.

At the moment, she is particularly excited about this season’s team.

“We have some really experienced returners, but we hit the jackpot a little bit in recruiting,” she said. “There’s a lot of talent in this freshman class, so it will be really interesting to see how the experienced young women that we have returning jell with the freshmen.”

Regardless of what this season holds, Hozak shows no signs of slowing down.

She still talks about her sport with the bubbly enthusiasm of a first-year coach. She remains uber competitive. She still runs her annual summer youth camp, which she did during the first week of July.

As much as those parts of her persona have remained the same, her willingness to change, she said, has been the key to her longevity.

“I am still the same person, but I have recognized that I don’t coach the same type of athletes,” she said. “And that’s not anything that’s bad. … What motivated young women 15 years ago, 20 years ago, isn’t the same thing that motivates athletes now.

“You have to evolve with the game. If you’re not willing to evolve with the game and not willing to evolve with the individuals that you’re coaching, you’re not going to last.”