Inside HOKIE SPORTS | Vol. 13 No. 1 | August 2020

volleyball spotlight marci byers inside.hokiesports.com 29 Continued on page 30 volleyball. I did that, and it just kind of took off. I was a sponge and learned.” After teaching math for more than a decade—eight years at Hermitage and two at Mills Godwin—and coaching junior varsity, varsity, and club volleyball, Byers decided to take her career path in a different direction. She started applying for Division II and Division IIl head coaching positions. She ultimately landed the head job at Chowan University, a Division II school in Murfreesboro, North Carolina—roughly two hours south of Richmond. As one might imagine, she didn’t have a lot to work with in terms of resources. At Tech, she has two full-time assistant coaches, an operations person, and individual people from sports medicine, nutrition, strength and conditioning, and academic advising all dedicated to her program. She also gets blessed with a healthy operating budget. At Chowan, she had none that—literally. Not even a single assistant coach. Yet that failed to deter her. She had performed all those types of tasks as a high school coach, so she really knew nothing different. She embraced the challenge, and after going 4-17 in her first season, she went 26-11 in her second year. “I had to figure out everything on my own,” Byers said. “I had to figure out how to do a budget and how to order equipment, how to travel to games and how to recruit. I had to learn all of that stuff on my own, and I think it gave me a different sense of work ethic. I really think it helped to shape me into the head coach I was able to become. It was a lot of trial and error, but the trial and error was all mine. I was able to really learn from that. “I also think being in a classroom for 10.5 years and teaching a subject that you really have to get kids interested in because not a lot of kids are interested in math, you’ve got to figure out a way to manage that because everybody has to take math in high school no matter what. Being up in front of a classroom, I kind of relate that to being a head coach. You’re your own person when you’re in your classroom. You have lessons, and you have to prepare your students. I had done that for so long that it was just kind of second nature for me.” After two seasons at Chowan, Byers applied for the Radford job, and AD Robert Lineburg hired her. Radford provided her with a few more resources, but she never changed her work ethic or formula for success. True to her algebra background, she only added those variables to her constants, which produced the right answers for her winning equation. She was comfortable with consistent winning at Radford. But when she received a call from John Ballein [Tech’s executive AD], who told her to come to Blacksburg for a chat—he even told her not to worry about dressing up—she felt intrigue at the possibility. The challenge of coaching in the ACC excited her, and when she received the offer from Babcock, she accepted. “I just thought if we could get kids to come to Radford, we could definitely do it at Virginia Tech, and then with the ACC behind that, it wasn’t a hard sell” she said. “I was really excited to be able to have the new opportunity. Yes, the success at Radford was great. I had had some other opportunities to move on, some other Power 5’s, but those just didn’t feel right. This one felt better for various reasons—family reasons, location. It was just the right time for me to be able to make that move.” In a rarity in the college athletics world, she didn’t even have to relocate, staying at her place in Christiansburg.