Greeny Set to Usher in Next Half Century of Mountaineer Volleyball
August 27, 2024 01:48 PM | Volleyball, Blog
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By: John Antonik
MORGANTOWN, W.Va. – Jen Greeny has made some unexpected decisions in her life.
After becoming one of the most prolific performers in Washington girls' basketball history while playing for her father, Jim Stinson, at Davenport High in Davenport, Washington, she turned down basketball offers from Tennessee, Stanford and Notre Dame to play college volleyball.
But as stunning as that move was then to Washingtonians, her decision last December to leave a perennial top-25 contender at Washington State to coach volleyball on the other side of the country at West Virginia University caught everyone off guard.
West Virginia?
"When certain opportunities present themselves, and you kind of sit on it and weigh the pros and cons, it's a feeling of like, 'Yeah, we better go try this,'" Greeny explained late last week.
There's no wading in here. Greeny is jumping into the deep end of the lake without a life preserver or a boat to take her to safety.
West Virginia volleyball, celebrating its 50th year this season, has little history to tout. The program has only one NCAA Tournament regional appearance in 2021 and an overall 756-824 record competing in the West Virginia, Eastern 8, Atlantic 10, Big East and Big 12 conferences.
Last year, WVU slipped to 9-22 overall and just 2-16 in Big 12 play. Two years ago, West Virginia was winless in 16 conference matches.
Since joining in 2012, the Mountaineers have gone winless in the Big 12 three times, have never won more than eight matches and are still seeking their first winning season versus league opponents.
Meanwhile, 2,369 miles away in Pullman, Washington, Greeny's Cougars were on cruise control with 20-win campaigns in 2018, 2019, 2021, 2022 and 2023. She would have had another 20-win season in 2020 if not for COVID-19 shutting down play everywhere.
Last year, Washington State topped national champion Texas 3-1 during the regular season and ended the year 26-8 overall and 14-6 in the Pac-12 before bowing out in the NCAA Tournament round of 16 to fourth-ranked Pitt.
Then,13 days later, Greeny was doing a zoom call with West Virginia media talking about taking over a program that she was still learning about in real time.
"It was a pretty fast process," she admitted. "I'm not a city girl. I knew Morgantown was a college town, and I love college towns and the core values of a hard-working state and its people. That's what building is all about, the people you surround yourself with."
Lincoln Logs were probably already a thing of the past when Jen Stinson was a little girl, but you can imagine her spending an entire day constructing an elaborate log cabin because she's made a great career out of building things.
She did it at Lewis-Clark State, where she won an eye-opening 82.4% of her matches in four seasons there before taking over at her alma mater in 2011 following a winless Pac-12 season in 2010.
Greeny took some lumps her first five seasons at Washington State before turning the corner in 2016 with a 22-12 overall record and the school's first NCAA Tournament appearance in seven years.
Seven more followed.
"Not to date myself, but that was before the (transfer) portal really changed things, so you were recruiting a class that was still three years out and it wasn't until maybe '13 or '15 when we were getting (better players)," she explained. "It took a little more time than we wanted."
During Greeny's first year at Washington State, she estimated about 40 girls showed up for her first volleyball camp. Last year, more than 800 were registered. The Cougars went from playing in empty arenas to selling out a handful of matches last year and creating an exciting and fun volleyball environment at 3,000-seat Bohler Gymnasium.
Consequently, it was excruciating for her to have to walk away from all of that last December, but circumstances out of her control necessitated the move.
"We weren't just going to settle and become a mid-major," Greeny explained. "There were so many things that were up in the air with that. Recruiting was really difficult. When recruits call and ask what conference you are going to be in, and you can't answer them truthfully … and we always want to be truthful with recruits.
"We're parents, and I don't know if I would let my daughter go where you don't know what the financial situation is or what conference they are playing in. The instability really did it."
The vision of Wren Baker, one of college sports' up-and-coming athletic directors at West Virginia University, was comforting to Greeny the more she listened to him.
She told him "No thanks" the first time he asked her to coach the volleyball team, but that was merely an orange cone for him to avoid.
He kept asking her until she finally said yes.
"Wren Baker is a pretty great recruiter," Greeny told the Seattle Times. "He's going to be a great person to work for. He has a great team in place, and the support and vision there for us trying to build this program is very exciting."
True to his word, Baker has already given Greeny some of the resources that she is going to need to make WVU a factor in women's volleyball. New furniture and a fresh coat of paint for her office, sport-specific gear for her players instead of generic "West Virginia" t-shirts and sweatshirts, and most importantly, a new state-of-the-art playing surface for the WVU Coliseum.
The days of student managers stretching out white gaffer tape to line the Coliseum floor are finally over. When the players tried out the new surface for the first time last week, it was like Disney World in Morgantown.
Greeny's West Virginia coaching staff includes her husband, Burdette, a former Washington State baseball player who played two years in the Milwaukee Brewers organization. His background as a professional pitcher actually translates well to college volleyball, Greeny says.
"Baseball is maybe the biggest crossover sport, and he was a pitcher, so mechanics and fielding the ball defensively, you are kind of getting into the same position in volleyball," she explained. "Reading (teammates), eye work and all of that, there is really big crossover."
The rest of her staff is comprised of another married couple, Mike and Aubrey Becker.
The Beckers came about through Greeny's relationship with Pitt coach Dan Fisher. It is perhaps the first and only time in the long history of the Backyard Brawl that a Panther has ever lent a hand to a Mountaineer!
"I'm not from the East Coast, and we know Pitt's staff, so we reached out and they were the ones who suggested Mike Becker," she said. "He's from Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and he was their ops person, so he is someone who knows the area and he has family here. Then, we did a little more research and figured out that he was married to another coach.
"(Aubrey) has great ties at Florida State, Brown, Davidson, Oral Roberts and Iowa, so she was in a different part of the country than we've been," Greeny said. "We are probably the only double-married staff in the country, but they are great, and we know how to do the married thing."
Ibrahim was one of the best players in the MEAC who led the Eagles to the NCAA Tournament last year. Finnvold, Reed and Tanton were also members of NCAA teams last season.
The two freshmen are Eily Painter from Pottsville, Pennsylvania, and Nina Svetina from Slovenia.
It's a small roster with only 13 players available, two fewer than Greeny would prefer, but she's been encouraged so far with their willingness to work and learn.
Greeny's goal since the first practice last February was to improve the team's basic volleyball skills.
"I think fundamentals are a huge part of what we do, and what we have done to be successful," Greeny said. "And part of that is probably because I was a basketball player, and I didn't know what the heck I was doing when I first started playing volleyball.
"My coaches were really, really big on the fundamental part of it," she continued. "There are different philosophies of coaches out there, some are more six-on-six and just play, play, play. We are a lot more drill-based because if you can't do the basic skills then you are not going to be able get out there and do them well during matches."
Right now, Greeny said sticking to the process is the most important thing for her players to understand.
"It's really easy to focus on outcome, so we are focused on being process-based to where (we ask them), 'Did you step with the right foot? If you do that, that's great because we don't care where the ball goes right now.' Teaching a team that has been kind of beaten down a little bit, these are wins for us in practice right now.
"We might just be looking at stats and comparing it to year's past. Are we closer? Are we closing the gap? Are we going to more five-set matches?" she said. "These are little things we can celebrate until we get the mentality changed to where if we do this, then the results will come."
When it all comes together like it did at Washington State, Greeny said the process becomes player driven.
"If your team really knows your values and can take that from inside, then the coaches are just facilitating a little bit," she said.
The goals here will be the same ones she established first at Lewis-Clark and then at Washington State.
"Beating teams we are not supposed to beat is really fun. Getting into the top 25, getting into the NCAA Tournament … all of that comes with it," Greeny explained. Two-time Pac-12 Coach of the Year Jen Greeny brings a 347-199 career record to Morgantown (WVU Athletic Communications).
The move from the bottom to the middle to the top is an exercise in consistency, Greeny noted.
"Those middle teams, most of the time, they are pretty good or maybe they've got one great player, but she's not always really on it or can't handle the pressure," she said. "Then, the bottom teams are just inconsistent, and you don't know what you are going to get from game to game, whether that's mentality-wise, whether that's just skill-wise, plus, injuries also play a part and with that comes depth."
This year's squad will likely be held together with bubble wrap, but Greeny is excited to see another team across the net from them this Friday afternoon when West Virginia takes on Navy in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. The following day, the Mountaineers will play Wake Forest in a match that will be televised on ACC Network.
WVU's 2024 slate includes five matches against teams in this year's preseason coaches' poll, including 13th-ranked Kansas twice. Four others are also getting votes.
Surrounding West Virginia regionally are volleyball powerhouses Pitt, Penn State, Dayton, Louisville, Kentucky and Tennessee. Those are the programs Greeny is going to be battling for recruits in the coming years.
"We've got to get West Virginia on the map, that's for sure," she said. "It helps that we were successful coming from Washington State in a small college town, and there are definitely way more players here on the East Coast, just population-wise, but there are also more schools to fight those players for.
"We pride ourselves on developing players and maybe for right now, we are taking some of these three-star athletes and figuring out what we can do with them training wise and compete that way."
This year is going to be a big change for Jen Greeny, and it's also going to be a big change for WVU volleyball. In many ways, Year 50 is really Year One for the program with Greeny at the helm.
She recalled some advice former men's basketball coach Dick Bennett once gave her when they were together at Washington State.
"While getting to know him, he was like, 'I got to a level where it was not fun anymore, or not as rewarding. It's the building process where you see so much growth and there is so much pride in that. Then, once you get to a certain level, it's just a different kind of pressure and maybe it's not as fun.'
"Maybe it's my educational background. My dad was a teacher and a coach. My two older brothers are teachers and coaches, and I was an education major, and it's hard to teach kids who know everything, right?" she laughed.
Here at West Virginia University, Greeny will get an opportunity to teach winning volleyball to everyone – players, former players, department staffers, fans and community members.
"People have been tremendous, asking how they can help, which is similar to where we came from," she said.
But Morgantown already has a leg up on Pullman in a couple of ways. One, Greeny had about 20 more campers than her first camp at Washington State 13 years ago, and secondly, she already has a food dish named after her.
You can order a "Greeny" at local dining establishment Bartini, which consists of steak and crabcake. Greeny says she has been sticking with sushi, so far, but is eager to give it a try.
Based on some of her other life decisions, this one should be far easier to make.
