Hosting SLT latest milestone for Coyotes under Williamson

The Summit League’s automatic bid to the NCAA volleyball tournament will be the ultimate goal this week at the Sanford Coyote Sports Center with the University of South Dakota promising to make a strong effort to land a berth. 

It’s impossible not to note that USD’s status as a perennial Summit League title contender includes the same head coach for those seasons -- Williamson.

Leanne Williamson became an assistant coach for the Coyotes in 2009. She became head coach in 2014 and USD has since then gone 99-28 in regular-season Summit League matches. Since 2016, the Coyotes have won or shared the regular-season or tournament title four times. They go into the 2021 tournament in Vermillion with a 15-3 mark in conference play and the second seed. They will play Denver or South Dakota State on Friday at 7 p.m. in the semifinals.

Williamson was a recent Wisconsin-Milwaukee graduate – and one of that school’s all-time great players – when she was hired by USD head coach Matt Houk as an assistant in time for the 2009 season. 

After the 2013 season, Houk took a job as an assistant coach at the University of Minnesota, where he remains as part of Hugh McCutcheon’s staff with the Gophers. Shortly thereafter, Williamson was offered the head coaching job at USD. 

The former All-American had a decision to make. When the Coyote job became available she was pregnant with twin boys Jaxon and Logan. Was she willing to devote the added responsibilities to her job when she also had some changes coming at home?

“Looking back on it, it was a fork in the road for me,” Williamson said. “Do I try to stay on as an assistant, hoping the next coach will keep me on the staff? Or did I feel like I was prepared for the head coaching job? I don’t think you ever feel fully prepared to be a head coach for the first time – you have to take a leap of faith on that. But I knew what the program was about and I was very confident that the program was going to keep moving forward and upwards.”

As we all know, she took the job. Her twins have since then become part of the fabric of the program and she and husband Tyler have since added daughter Kinsley to the family. In the meantime she has emphatically answered her own questions about whether she was ready back in 2014 to become the leader of a program that was still getting its Division I feet wet when she took it over. 

As much as it was a wise decision by Williamson to take the job, it was also wise for USD to get past the fact that she did not have time as a head coach. The numbers say as much. Under Williamson, the Coyotes lost more than four Summit League matches in a season only once during her tenure. And next week they will be trying to secure their third NCAA tournament berth in the last four seasons. 

That progression has been accompanied by distinctive fan interest at the SCSC. As Williamson said, “They absolutely make a difference for us.”

Given that the tournament takes place over the Thanksgiving break, it will be a little bit more difficult to recreate the environment that has been part of so many USD victories over the last five years. That doesn’t mean it won’t happen. 

In either case, the long-term prospects continue to be encouraging. That’s how it has always worked during the Williamson era. In spite of her inexperience when she started out, there have been no obvious dips over her eight years at the helm. 

“I never want to stop learning,” Williamson said. “We’ve made a lot of small changes along the way. Overall, I think my communication style has gotten better. I try to be upfront and honest with my players so that they understand where we’re coming from and we can understand where they’re coming from.”

This native of Hartford, Wisconsin, a suburb of Milwaukee, has now lived in Vermillion for more than 12 years. That adds up to almost her whole life since she graduated from college. She’s cool with that.