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

30 Inside Hokie Sports @PrestonsRestaurant @InnVirginiaTech 540.231.0120 | www.InnatVirginiaTech.com 901 Prices Fork Rd, Blacksburg, VA 24061 (inside The Inn at Virginia Tech) Reservations recommended. A delicious game-day tradition. B EFORE THE GAME OR AFTER, Preston’s Restaurant is a delicious place for a new game-day tradition. Start with our fresh breakfast. Order lunch or dinner from our mouth-watering menu of seasonal cuisine. Sip on hand-cra ed cocktails or a selection from our award-winning wine list. And don’t forget the Valley’s best brunch, every Sunday at Preston’s. Make Preston’s Restaurant your game-day tradition. With her decision, she even shortened her commute time to 10 minutes. That aside, she does face a challenge. The Hokies haven’t finished better than sixth in the ACC since joining the league, and they last won a conference title in 1992. Yet she wants the challenge—and her first, and most important, step involves recruiting better talent. She spent her first several months on the job attacking the recruiting process as much as allowable in a pandemic world. “This is college,” Byers said. “This is Division I, the highest level, and you have to have better volleyball players. That’s not a secret. You have to have better talent in order to be able to win. Playing hard and being gritty is only going to be able to take you so far, especially when you’re at this level. When other teams have All-Americans and you don’t have any, it’s going to be hard to win. That’s just the reality of it. “The reality is we have to get better players. We have to get better players for our system, and we got to figure out how we can make those players fit to what we want and then have other pieces around them. But it’s no secret. If you don’t have the talent, you really can’t win. It’s really going to have to start there. Training and being better prepared will always help, but if I have two All-Americans on my team, then I give myself a better chance than if I had none.” In addition to recruiting, she carves out time for networking with former Tech volleyball players. She held a series of Zoom calls with them this summer and uses social media as ways of introducing herself. She understands the importance of bridging the past with the present—and moving everyone toward hopefully a successful future. “The bottom line is they want Virginia Tech volleyball to be better, they want the student-athletes to have a good experience, and they want them to be successful once they graduate,” she said. Of course, she spends time with her family. Her and her husband J.D. have a young daughter, and her husband works as an assistant men’s basketball coach at VCU. The distance between them complicates their marriage, but the two of them make it work because of their commitment, discipline, and work ethic toward it. Those are the same constants that she brings to her role as the Virginia Tech volleyball coach. She knows how to solve problems. Babcock, Ballein and the rest of Hokie Nation are optimistic that she knows how to change the fortunes of Virginia Tech volleyball, and they should be. After all, they’ve done the math, too—and the numbers certainly are in her favor. COUNTING ON Historic Hire To Lead To Success Continued from page 29 As she gears up for her first season, Marci Byers’ biggest fan will be daughter Kamryn.