Chris Gravel wanted to be a baseball coach before he became a volleyball coach. Courtesy | Hillsdale College Athletic Department

Despite saying he’d only be at Hillsdale College for two years, head volleyball coach Chris Gravel is now in his 28th season of coaching the Chargers. 

Gravel is Hillsdale’s first full-time coach. He said the plan was to transform the program from a losing to a winning team in two years and then move on. Now he has 596 Hillsdale wins under his belt. 

Gravel said his whole family played sports growing up. 

“I came from an athletic family,” Gravel said. “I was the oldest of three siblings. Both of my sisters played a lot of sports, too. My dad was a really good ballplayer and played a lot of sports and coached some of my teams, so I love them all. I just love competing.”

Gravel said he did not originally expect to pursue volleyball.

 “I was going to be a baseball coach — a hitting coach specifically,” Gravel said. “That’s what I was studying to do. One of my professors had to teach volleyball to the class: methods of teaching. He had played at Ball State and noticed that I was a pretty good athlete, and he still was playing on a travel team, so he asked me to play on that team.”

Gravel said he quickly learned volleyball is challenging, and it’s not just a women’s sport. 

“That same teacher, who was a player, said ‘Hey, you know we’re short in practice,’ because he was the head coach of the women’s team at Wayne State,” Gravel said. 

Gravel said the teacher told him he didn’t usually have men play at practice, but he needed a middle hitter, so he asked Gravel to play. 

“I said, ‘Sure. I can work that in between classes and my job and stuff,’” Gravel said. “When I got in there and the girls were so much better than me, I took a real strike to my ego. I was like, ‘I need to learn this game.’” 

Gravel said he wanted to coach volleyball from this moment forward. 

“I started coaching club volleyball and playing more doubles and indoor,” Gravel said. “I still love baseball, but I just fell in love with volleyball, and that was my new love.”

Gravel said Hillsdale paid him the lowest salary possible when he accepted the position as Hillsdale’s head volleyball coach. He did not intend to stay at Hillsdale longer than it took to turn the team around, but then he learned more about the community. 

“When I got here I knew nothing about Hillsdale, and that’s where I started learning a little about Hillsdale and about being in a small-town environment, and it was just really intriguing,” Gravel said. 

Gravel said his wife was his assistant and then associate head coach for 25 years.

“We had several opportunities to leave, but they always did something just enough to keep us, and we kind of really loved the area and Hillsdale College,” Gravel said.

Allyssa VanWienen ’21, Hillsdale’s current assistant volleyball coach, said she felt like she was surrounded by family from the moment she visited Hillsdale her junior year of high school. 

“I was just surrounded by good people almost immediately,” VanWienen said. “Everyone came up and introduced themselves to me. They were genuinely interested in where I came from and what my story was.” 

VanWienen said she liked how members of the team were respectful towards each other but still joked and laughed together. 

“I come from a big family, so I was like, this is home for me,” VanWienen said.

VanWienen said working with Gravel was different from her prior experiences with highschool coaches. 

“He is a very hands-off coach,” VanWienen said. “I came from a high school where my coach was very in-your-face all the time. If you did something wrong she would let you know right away and also let you know how to fix it. Then I came here, and it was like the other side of a coin basically.” 

VanWienen said Gravel would let her learn from her mistakes and figure out how to fix them on her own. 

“If I was making mistakes over and over then of course he would come up to me and say, ‘Hey, this is what I’ve noticed. Maybe if you did this instead, you would see more results.’”

Gravel said his teaching philosophy aligns with Hillsdale’s values. 

“I really like what the players become when they leave the program, and that’s what I’m most proud of,” Gravel said. 

Gravel said his goal is to teach the women to be outwardly focused. 

“His goal is always to create good teammates and good players as a result of being a good teammate,” VanWienen said. 

When she played on the team, VanWienen said she always did her best to help her teammates, not to make herself look good. 

Junior Lauren Passaglia said she was excited Hillsdale had both excellent academics and excellent volleyball. 

Passaglia said this program has impacted her personal growth. 

“The culture that coach has really formed at the school is pretty unbelievable and it has been super fun to become a part of it and really just to see how much I’ve grown, not only as a player, but as a person,” Passaglia said. “He values being a good person, not just a volleyball player at the end of the day because there’s so much more than volleyball.” 

Passaglia said Gravel is a successful coach.

“He focuses not just on good volleyball players but good students and good people,” Passaglia said. “He looks a lot into the way we interact with our parents and the people we meet on our visits and looks a lot into more than just what we are on the court, so he’s formed a really great culture in our program by really going the extra mile when it comes to recruiting and bringing in the right people.”