Why they coach: Wayne Kreklow
Over the course of the next eight weeks, PowerMizzou.com is running a series of stories with the head coach of every varsity sport at Mizzou. The basic gist of the interviews began as “why do you coach?” Throughout each story, there will be many of the same questions, but with each subject we veer off on to some tangents as well.These interviews will run every Tuesday and Friday morning on the site from now until early July. Today, our conversation with head volleyball coach Wayne Kreklow.
PM: I want to start way back, growing up, what sports did you play?
WK: “You know, I’m going back a little way now. That was back in the days we did everything. Whatever time of the year it was, you played football in the fall, basketball in the winter, up in Wisconsin baseball was in the summer so I never played baseball. I did track in the spring. And then my junior year I switched instead of football in the fall, that’s when I first started playing volleyball. We had high school boys volleyball in Wisconsin and it was a fall sport. I had a couple of friends that got injured playing football and I knew by that time, I was probably going to do basketball in college so I thought now it’s not worth the injury risk. So I switched over to volleyball and that’s where I started playing.”
PM: How far did your career as an athlete take you?
WK: “I ended up playing I think it was four years post college in basketball. One year with Boston, it was 80 and 81, which was a great year to be with them because we won the championship and I was a part of that. Then I played two years in what back in the day was called the CBA, the Continental Basketball Association. It would be like the D-league, only far less organized. Then I played one year over in Sydney, Australia in their national basketball league. After that it was time to get a real job.”
PM: When along that way did you know what you wanted the real job to be was coaching?
WK: “You know, honestly my entry into this profession was kind of a weird, round-about thing. Honestly, it was by accident. Between seasons, between the basketball seasons, I would always go back to Des Moines because I graduated from Drake and I knew people, had places to stay, friends there and all that. And so after my fourth year back after playing, I was back in Des Moines and it was the summertime. And I really honestly had no idea what I really wanted to do. I graduated with an undergrad in social science, but junior year, I’m thinking I have no idea what I want to do with this. My father was a teacher and I thought, well, if nothing else, I’ll just get a teaching job. So I got my teaching certification but I wasn’t an education major. And when I got back there, I needed a job and so I thought well I can substitute teach and make some money doing that. I did that for a bit and then in the summertime, I was just doing odd things. One day I got a knock on the door, some guy I’d never met before is there and introduced himself. He was the basketball coach at Lincoln High School in Des Moines, a large 5A school. He said, ‘You know, I’m looking for a JV basketball coach and talked to (Bob) Ortegal— who was my college coach at the time—and he said I should track you down, that you were in town and didn’t know what you were doing.’ And so I really got into coaching like that. I go, well, I got nothing else to do so I’ll give that a shot. That next season I was substitute teaching, coaching the JV team, assisting him and honestly that was just a knock on the door one day and that’s how it started.”
PM: Is there somebody in your past that you kind of look at that stood out as influential or a mentor in coaching for you?
WK: “I tell you for me, and sometimes we’ll talk about this in some of these coaching clinics when we talk about how you get into it, why you’re doing it and why do you coach like you coach? I think for me, I kind of look back, I don’t know if there was one single one that stood out, but I just had so many of them and they all were a little bit different. Some were positive, some were negative, some were quiet, some were loud. But the one thing I’ve always tried to do with my coaching is I think I always paid attention and would be able to look back and go, ‘Okay, this coach was really good at this, I’m going to try to to use it.’ But also, I tell you, the bad probably had just as much of an impact on how I do things now as the good actually. There are times that I’m going, if I coach, I’m never going to do this because it made me feel awful or it was bad or it made me play worse. So you’re able to file those kind of things away too, basically what not to do when you’re coaching.”
PM: Most coaches will say it takes a spouse who understands the profession and deals with all the other stuff in life. You guys are different in that you and your wife are both coaches. Explain first of all in your program, she was the head coach for a while. In general, what’s the dynamic there and then what’s it like having another coach in the household? Both positive and negative?
WK: “I think having Susan and I do this together over the years, without her, I don’t know if I would have been able to do what we’ve done. And I don’t know if she would have without me honestly. Again, it was just kind of luck. Personally, I don’t preach from the pulpit, but I do believe in God and I do look back and it’s just like every step along the way, I just got steered in the right direction. Meeting her was really what got this whole thing all going from a volleyball standpoint. It’s kind of funny, I’ll talk to other coaches and they’ll say ‘it must be nice to have someone to talk to that really gets it.’ They say, ‘You know my wife is very understanding, she’s very supportive, she’ll listen, but she doesn’t really get what I do.’ Unless you’re in it, it’s hard to really understand and I think that’s one thing that’s been so great for Susan and I. Because we both live it, when we talk about it, you’re really talking to somebody that really understands. So that’s always been really, really good. And I think we just play off of each other really well. Like I’ve got weaknesses that are her strengths and vice versa and it’s just been a really great team. We just work really well together. I don’t know, it’s crazy to think we’ve been doing this together for almost 30 years now.”
PM: Where along your path did it shift from basketball to volleyball?
WK: “When I was doing basketball doing my substitute teaching and working at Lincoln High School and doing that, after three years of that, I thought I’m just going to start in with some teaching jobs in Iowa that opened up. Two of them actually I applied for. One was in another 5A program in Des Moines. Highly successful program, state tournament appearances, the whole bit. The other one was a little 1A school in Southern Iowa. Tom Lee was the coach at Lincoln at the time. I was talking to him and asking him his opinion on either one and he goes, ‘You know, to be honest with you, you could go that 5A if they’d take you, it’s a great job, great school.’ But he said ‘I’ll tell you one thing: If that’s your first job, if it doesn’t go well, there’s nowhere to go from there.’ He said you go to a little small school, you can make mistakes, you can cut your teeth and no one’s ever going to know if you screw it up. They didn’t offer me (the larger school). At the time, I think everybody in Des Moines, they knew who I was but I didn’t have any head coaching experience. But they did hire me at the 1A school. I did boys basketball and girls volleyball. After three year, our teams did well, we made it to the state tournament, won a couple conference titles. But it was a small school and I was really fortunate to have a good core group of kids who were sophomores when I got there and after their senior year, I’m kind of looking at what’s coming up and I’m thinking it could be another four or five years before we have anything. And I’m feeling like if I want to stay in education, I want to get a degree that eventually can get me out of a classroom. I was social studies. And in the interim, when I was doing the subbing and basketball, I was still playing volleyball with a number of different adult men’s teams clubs. I gravitated eventually to a team that had a lot of former collegiate players. Ohio State, Ball State, all those people. One of them was Craig Sherman who was the head women’s coach here at Mizzou back in the late eighties, early nineties. He had a GA position that was coming open, the timing worked out perfect. I thought if I’m going to get a Master’s, I’ve got to go do it and get it done because coaching in high school and trying to do a Master’s would take me years with all the summer obligations with summer camps and leagues and such. So I just came down here in 1990 with the thought of I’ve got a two year Master’s degree program here and I’ve been here every since doing volleyball. I’ve never left.”
PM: Every coach who gets to this level says there are plenty of people who could be where I am that just never got the break. I think you might have just answered this, but what was your break?
WK: “Really that was kind of it. Again, when I look back over the years, that’s why I don’t believe it’s luck. Nobody can be that lucky. It just seems like at turning points somebody or something always popped in and I ended up going into a higher trajectory, better job, better people and I got that break. It just happened to open up right when I was looking for something. I was here with Craig for, I think, about four years. And Susan in the mean time had been named the head coach at Columbia College. So she was over at Columbia College. Craig Sherman resigned so once again I’m kind of going, I don’t know what I’m going to do here. Bob Burchard reaches out and asks if I’m interested in going over and coaching women’s basketball. They didn’t have it but he wanted to add it. I said sure. That will keep us both at Columbia College, we can both stay. He goes to President Ruthenburg and he kind of balked at adding women’s basketball because he wanted more men on campus at the time. So long story short, Ruthenburg decides he’s going to add men’s volleyball at Columbia College. Once again, there I go, Susan and I are coaching men and women at Columbia College. Five years later, Disa Johnson gets fired here and we end up over at Mizzou. Mike Alden hires us. Between Burchard and Alden and all these people I just feel incredibly lucky to have been given all these opportunities.”
PM: You’ve coached guys at a lot of different times. What are the differences or the challenges in coaching a men’s team versus a women’s team?
WK: “Honestly, it’s very different in some respects. In some respects the game’s the game. In some ways, the way you play it, fundamentals are fundamentals. But I do really believe that from a coaching standpoint, your approach, your demeanor, how you interact with your players differs a lot between the women and the men. In general. That’s kind of an overgeneralization. Within that you’ve got individual players obviously that are a little bit different. I’ve always told people the real plusses and the real joys of coaching women is I think they’re much more in tune to relationships. They’re much more open. I think they’re much more willing to kind of give of themselves, their personalities. The downside of that is we can get too caught up in that at times. As a coach working with women, I think me particularly—Susan’s always been really good with that, she’s just got a knack for that—for me it’s a little bit harder to kind of develop those relationships. I was never that kind of person. It’s been harder for me. I used to laugh because I’d walk into women’s practice at Columbia College, the players all kind of saunter out, they’re sitting around, they’re all chatting, but most of them are kind of sitting on the side talking and I’m going ‘Okay, are we ready to go? Let’s get going here.’ Men’s practice, you walk in the gym, they’re up playing pepper, they’re getting after it, there’s no sitting around. They were enthused, they wanted to start, they loved playing. Super competitive. The guys, you hear all the little stories, whatever sport, we could have a fist fight in the middle of practice. You send everybody to their corners, at the end of practice, everybody’s high-fiving and walking out together like nothing ever happened. That doesn’t occur when you’re coaching women. There was plusses and minuses to each, but from a coaching standpoint, Susan and I always had to be very aware of how we were managing that. It’s not happenstance. You got to be thinking about how you manage different groups of people.”
PM: It’s not normal in coaching to spend 30 years in the same place. Were there times one or both of you thought about going somewhere else?
WK: “There were times. There were times. Honestly, the first one was when in 2000 the Mizzou job opened up. Bob came in, ‘I got a call from Mike Alden about you guys, wants to know if you’re interested in the MU job at all. It opened up and they’re looking to interview people.’ We started talking, Susan and I were talking. At the time we had already won two national championships, we probably were set up to do it again. Our conversation was we could stay here at Columbia College, be very happy, win probably 90% of our matches for the rest of our life. Things were pretty easy. I mean easy in the sense we were established, we had things going. But our conversation was a little bit, would we regret not taking the shot? I told Susan my feeling was I’m not leaving just to leave. If we want to really dive into this thing, I told her prior to coming here I had lived a lot of places as a kid and traveled around a lot. I’ve been in a lot of places and there’s a lot of nice places out there, but not many I’ve been to that are better than Columbia. So if we’re going to move, it better be for a good reason. At Mizzou, things would open up and we’d kind of look at something somewhere else, but the same thing would happen. In all the traveling with our own team here at Mizzou, we’ve been on all the campuses, we’ve been in all the college towns and there are some other places just as good. But better? I don’t know. So I felt like this is about as good as you can do. I don’t think we wanted to be one of those folks that were always looking for the next big thing. It probably hurt us in terms of contract and salary because we didn’t have an agent out there beating the bushes for us and playing that game, but I thought if we want to be here, we want to be here.”
PM: Big picture, what’s been for you the most rewarding thing about coaching?
WK: “I think for me and I think Susan would probably say something similar, I think it’s been just the ability to have the relationships with so many kids over the years. None of our kids anymore do Facebook. That’s kind of like for old people. But if there’s one nice thing about Facebook for me, it’s following our kids that are on it. Sometimes I just go, ‘Susan, check this out. So and so, this is their third kid or their kids are playing youth volleyball now or they’ve got a different job or they’re married.’ For me, I think it’s always been about just watching people that you’ve had, just where they go, what they do, how they turn out. It’s been a really special thing to be around so many kids and just watch them move on and become adults and successful in their fields. For me, that would be it. I mean there’s been some moments on the court. Obviously we’ve won a couple SEC championships, been in the tournament a lot, had some big wins and all that type of stuff, but at the end of the day, I think if I’d be looking back at a career and ask me what the most rewarding part has been, that’s it.”
PM: Flip side, what’s the most difficult or challenging part?
WK: “I think for me the hardest thing, I’ll tell you one. The hardest thing over the years, every coach would say the same thing, the hardest thing is dealing with all the people that they’re not in your program, but they impact what happens. Over the years, it seems like sometimes as coaches we spend more time fighting our own people than we do fight against people from other schools. Just internally. There’s always issues going on. The one thing when I do end up retiring, that will be the one thing that I will not miss is fighting for this for your kids, fighting for that. Whether it’s budget money or marketing or space or time or coaching. That’s to me, from a coaching standpoint, the recruiting. Probably a lot of coaches would say that. I don’t mind, I love meeting people, talking to parents, talking to kids, but the travel, the stress of trying to compete with other programs to get kids. And for me, too, honestly, I’ve always tended to, losing always hurts a lot more than the joy of winning. Fortunately there haven’t been a lot of them, but there’s been matches and games over the years that they’re with you for a long time.”
PM: A little more micro, specific to Missouri, what are the biggest challenges coaching this program?
WK: “Fortunately there’s not a lot. We have them, but overall, which is why we’ve been here all these years, the positives way outweigh the negatives. For us, we’ve made a lot of inroads this last year with facility issues. Everybody keeps (getting) new, better, more updated. When we first got here, when basketball moved out and we moved down into the Hearnes Center, we had about five, six years where I’d have to say we’ve got one of the nicest places in the country in terms of volleyball. In the ensuing years, volleyball’s become a very, very popular sport collegiately and people have been for the last half a dozen, ten years or so, been investing a lot more money in facilities and coaches’ salaries and the whole bit. I think we’ve fallen behind to a certain extent. This last year, we’ve squirreled away a lot of money in our improvement fund. So we’ve done a lot in terms of renovating offices. For a long time we didn’t have a team room. So that’s gotten a lot better, but it’s just keeping up. The hard thing is just keeping up with what’s going on in the Power Five conferences.”
PM: And then your arena floods…
WK: “Yeah. And the Hearnes is great. I mean, the venue itself, the number of people that we get visiting and opponents that come in and look around and are like ‘Man, this is a great place to play.’ I always tell them when we have people come in we just make sure the lights are dimmed a little bit so you don’t see all the flaking paint in the corners and all that. Part of that problem in all fairness too, for a long time there was a lot of debate about what they were going to do with it. And for a while there was talk about tearing it down and I totally understand from an administrator’s standpoint we’re not gonna invest a half a million dollars in sprucing a place up that we’re gonna tear down. But I think now they’ve decided that it’s going to be there for a long time and so I think they’re looking at ways to update it. But it’s a great place to be. We’re (in) close proximity (to) Kansas City, St. Louis, Springfield, Iowa, Nebraska from a recruiting standpoint. We’re a little bit far in terms of the SEC, we’re on the fringes a little bit, but I don’t know, like I said, we’ve been here for as long as we have because there’s a lot of faults, but the plusses really outweigh negatives.”
PM: Whenever this is, a few years down the road, when you decide you’ve had enough, what do you want people to remember and say about you as a coach?
WK: For me and my wife both I think, I honestly would like people to remember us as somebody who really cared about their kids. I think over the years we’ve tried our best with every single kid we’ve had in our program. I look back sometimes and there’s a smattering of kids over 30 years where I look back and I go, I wish I would have done this instead or I wish I would have done that. Maybe I didn’t reach them like I wanted to and the opportunity was lost maybe. But I think in general both of us would like to be remembered as somebody who really cared about their people. At the end of the day, I think that’s it.”