[dropcap type=”2″]V[/dropcap]ictor Wirkkala has not been sleeping well recently.
The new Hawk volleyball coach lays awake at night analyzing his team and rises early to plan for his next opponent. In love with his sport, Wirkkala is restless and excited as he opens a new chapter in an already illustrious volleyball career.
“It’s not because I’m sick or anything,” he says. “It’s just that I come up with a new drill or I think about something else and I have to go get a dry erase board. I’m waking up at 5:30 or 6:30 in the morning thinking volleyball. It’s almost become an obsession.”
The past 28 years of Wirkkala’s life have been dominated by a kind of commitment like this. The outgoing Leominster native founded a volleyball program at Mount Wachusett Community College in 1986 before transferring to Westfield State in 1989. He played elite volleyball with the Owls for two seasons, captaining the team during his junior and senior years. He was also named a league all-star during his senior season.
Following college, Wirkkala dabbled with a pro career, before eventually turning to coaching as his primary source of income. He coached the Leominster boys’ varsity volleyball team for several years after 2000. He led a JV volleyball team at Ayer-Shirley High School (then called Ayer High School), and in 2009 he took over the Ayer-Shirley varsity team. Since then, Wirkkala has retired from his part time job as a police officer and taken over a job as coach of a club volleyball team at WPI. He still plays on club teams across Massachusetts as well. He insists that his playing career has remained alive alongside his long coaching career.
Wirkkala has defied a serious ankle injury that left him with multiple titanium pins permanently implanted in his foot to keep playing and coaching. He has taken the low salary of a high school coach with gratitude.
Now, he begins a new chapter in his career. Wirkkala steps in as coach of the historically dominant volleyball team at Hudson, having been hired out of a field of close to 15 candidates last spring.
He has since constructed a team centering heavily around a few seniors, augmented by a long list of younger players. Wirkkala has worked hard to get to know his team and says he values connection with all his players; be it those playing on varsity teams or either of the JV teams. He says he strives to strike a balance between hard drills and fun games during practices. Beyond that, Wirkkala impresses upon his players the fundamental aspects of volleyball, critiquing positioning and spiking technique among other things.
As far as leaders go, he calls attention to Meghan Cadden, a senior for Hudson, saying, “I call her NBK, Natural Born Killer, because she just gets so fierce on the court, yelling. She’s really into it.”
Cadden’s passion mirrors Wirkkala’s. So devoted in fact is Coach Wirkkala, that he recently began coming early to games so that he can set up cameras in the gym. His players study the film these cameras capture with the same focus on fundamentals that Wirkkala pushes in practice.
Wirkkala’s overall passion for volleyball rubs off on his players, many of whom smile and gush praise at the mention of his name. One of his goals — to have players never dread practice — has been fulfilled just in the first few weeks of the season.
He jokes with his players and says he himself looks forward to every moment of the season, including practices, bus rides, team meetings and more.
Hudson Athletic Director Jessica Winders says this fits her mold of a good coach perfectly. She says these same qualities and general expertise that Wirkkala has exhibited so far this season, stood out to her during the application process.
“It’s really about the experience,” she says . “When I look at a resume, I’m looking for experience coaching that sport specifically and also how long each person has been in a job. For example, if you have 15 years of coaching experience, but you have coached 15 different teams, that’s a red flag for me. With Coach Wirkkala it was a lot about the longevity he had at some of the places he coached and the success he had with those programs.”
She adds, “When I think of a coach that is successful, I think that he or she sees a situation and has the same kind of reaction to it as me. I think Mr. Wirkkala fits that.”
But before he had the job, Wirkkala’s was part of a stack of 12 resumes submitted to Winders in the spring. His name jumped onto a short list which Winders presented to the hiring committee and eventually earned him an interview with Winders and Principal Brian Reagan.
In August, he was officially named head coach of the volleyball team.
Truth be told, Wirkkala has a long career, filled with lessons about coaching, and memories of fantastic moments in volleyball. He draws from that on a daily basis; he has been for years. Yet now, as he starts his fourth high school coaching job, he is still as excited as ever.
“Never in my wildest dreams did I think I’d actually be a volleyball coach and actually make a little bit of money at it,” he says.
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[dropcap type=”2″]T[/dropcap]he path to a sustainable coaching career has been a long one for Wirkkala, taken in a sport that was never, and still is not, mainstream.
He did not have an opportunity to play volleyball in high school and only started playing when he and a few friends at Mount Wachusett Community College picked up a ball during their freshman year and thought it might be fun to “hack around” with it. They soon got the blessing of the school’s administration to start a team at MWCC, where Wirkkala began to hone his skills.
He transferred to Westfield State during his sophomore year. Westfield State had an established volleyball program. He said, however, that he was not initially good enough to play front row and was instead relegated to the back row for his first season.
“But I didn’t go home and quit,” he said of his time at Westfield State. “I worked extra hard and became the captain the next two years.”
During his senior season in 1991, Wirkkala qualified to play for an All-Star team run by the New England Collegiate Volleyball League.
Following his success in college, Wirkkala immediately fought to enter the professional circuit. He tried out for the Association of Volleyball Professionals in 1992 at a beach volleyball doubles tryout.
“We went out, but I got our butt kicked,” he said. “I knew I was going to be a semi-pro since then.”
Despite the setback, Wirkkala made the best of what he was given. While working as a part time police officer, he played for the semi-pro Straight Down Volleyball Club. His play at Straight Down Volleyball got him ranked among regional semi-pro players, a standing that continues to land him spots on competitive teams.
Wirkkala took his first coaching job in 2000 as the leader of his hometown Leominster boys volleyball team. He embraced the opportunity and enthusiasm his team provided.
“My first year at Leominster was great,” he said. “The greatest thing is I thought I was doing it for free, and then they told me they were gonna take taxes out and I was like ‘Oh I’m actually getting paid for this. This is great.’”
Unfortunately, Wirkkala’s time at Leominster was overlaid with the lingering unpopularity of volleyball. He and his players struggled to sell the sport to the rest of the school.
“We put up with a lot of negativity not only from the student body but from the other coaching staff,” he explained. “[They were] saying volleyball is not a real sport. Saying that you have to fit a certain criteria to play it. It was really bad there, especially since it’s been an Olympic sport for men for all this time.”
Wirkkala stuck around at Leominster nonetheless and gradually delegated more and more time to studying coaching volleyball. He attended conferences with NCAA volleyball coaches in the early 2000s. Most notably Wirkkala’s expanded his network within volleyball when he met Penn State coach, and volleyball coaching legend, Russ Rose at a coaches for coaches conference in 2007.
Reliving that experience, he commended the feeling of communal responsibility felt by volleyball professionals to work to promote the sport.
“We’re not fighting so much with other teams like hockey, like football, like soccer. We’re not as competitive as them. In volleyball everyone helps each other,” he said.
He eventually moved on to Ayer Shirley where he really cemented his resume as a top notch coach. Wirkalla led the Panthers through a two-year dynasty that culminated with an undefeated season.
The memories and lessons learned from his dominance at Ayer Shirley still stick with Wirkalla five years after the fact. To this day, he diverts credit for that undefeated season, which ended with a painful loss by the Panthers in the state championship, to his players. As he describes it, the 2010 Ayer-Shirley Panthers of volleyball felt the same unbridled love and commitment to volleyball that Wirkkala has always had.
Wirkkala tells of the first game of that season and the reaction to it that the players had.
“We had a lot of Monday games that year and the first Monday game we played; we came out cold because we didn’t have a practice the day before. After that, the team wanted to practice on Sundays. And I was sort of questioning it, like volleyball volleyball volleyball five days a week, now six or seven days; but they were committed to it, so we did it,” he says shrugging.
Wirkkala also says that that season proved to him the power of an individual moment in a season. He smiles as he remembers a game in 2010 against a then dominant Hudson volleyball team. During the game, one of his players saw a ball take a bad bounce off a teammate’s hands. As it flew towards the stands, the player, Wirkkala’s center, gave chase. He said she fearlessly jumped into the Hudson bleachers after the ball, and though she could not hit the ball back to her team, the entire squad was electrified.
“Thinking back, I remember that play perfectly and I really think that set up our season. When you have your six foot center jumping into the stands, that set the tone for our season and everybody followed.”
Wirkkala left Ayer-Shirley after 2010. He took over the WPI club team and now coaches that group in the same league he played in in college.
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[dropcap type=”2″]A[/dropcap]midst a career come full circle, Wirkkala is nowhere near done yet. He says that for the past five years, one of his top wishes has been to coach high school volleyball again. When a friend called to tell him about the opening at Hudson, he jumped.
Though it took several months, Wirkkala did eventually secure the job at Hudson.
He ran a meeting with players just a few days after he was confirmed as coach of the team, and ran a scrimmage with Leominster roughly one week before the season began.
All has not gone well though. Wirkkala lost defensive powerhouse Samantha Johnson to a knee injury suffered shortly after the Leominster scrimmage. He was forced to rework his defense. The shuffle did coincide with a two game stretch to start the season where the Hawks struggled to finish off a pair of games in close situations. As the team has perfected their defense though, they have come back with two convincing victories against South Worcester and Fitchburg respectively.
Throughout the see-saw start to the season, Coach Wirkalla has stayed true to his coaching mantra, paying little mind to the results of past games.
“I tell them all the time, regardless of the score, you go a point at a time. The pass, the set, the serve,” Wirkkala says. “You go a set at a time, a game at a time. We just play every team like it’s a championship game.”
He admits he feels a heightened responsibility to excel this season though.
“Especially for the seniors on this team, I know that it’s their senior year, and I know that there were some coaching problems last year. I feel I owe it to the senior class to play some hard core volleyball and maybe get our year up on the banner. It’s only fair to them because I think they got the bad end of the stick last year.”
It is true that Wirkkala enters the coaching role in the wake of a mismanaged 2014 season that was wrought with coaching issues and eventually resulted in the firing of last year’s volleyball coach.
Looking to brighten the culture of volleyball at Hudson, Wirkkala’s goals are broad and his desires are clear: he wants to win and he wants to stay Hudson’s coach for the foreseeable future.
Winders says that desire is clear and palpable when sitting next to Wirkkala at games.
“One of the things I look for when hiring someone is that energy, not necessarily an aggressive loud personality but passion,” she says. “Are you passionate? Are you invested and knowledgeable about the sport? And can you feel the excitement? You can certainly feel the excitement when you’re with Mr. Wirkkala. He loves volleyball, and he loves working with student athletes of all ages.”
Nearly twenty years after entering volleyball, Victor Wirkkala’s love affair with the sport continues to burn. After starting a team of his own, winning a spot as an all-star, coaching an undefeated season, and simply playing game after game, he struggles to define why he loves the sport so much.
“It’s just something I love,” he says. “You do it. You fall in love with it. Just like being in a relationship, ‘Why do you love this person?’ I don’t know, it just happened. I went with it.”
