Before she was the head coach of the South Hadley girls volleyball team, Sabrina Bardwell was already making a name for herself around western Massachusetts as a volleyball star – but it wasn’t for the Tigers.
Then Sabrina Riley, Bardwell was a dominant force on the Amherst Hurricanes volleyball team more than two decades ago, coached by her mother, legendary coach Betsy Riley. Riley had built a culture of success with the ‘Canes, and Bardwell was a direct product of that.
The two of them led the program to a western Mass. title in 1995 and reached the state final, falling just short to a powerhouse Medway team in five sets. That year, Riley was named the Division 2 Volleyball Coach of the Year by the Boston Globe and Bardwell became the first western Mass. player ever to earn a spot on the Globe’s 10-player All-Scholastic team; she also won the Massachusetts Gatorade Player of the Year Award during her high school career.
Volleyball was the center of Bardwell’s life. She earned a Division I scholarship to play at Siena, and coached for three years at Frontier after she graduated, winning a western Mass. title with the Redhawks in 2001. It seemed like Bardwell had the magic touch when it came to volleyball, and she was primed for a long career behind the bench.
But as it so often does, life got in the way, and Bardwell had to step away from volleyball for a while.
“I got into property management, which is really a nine-to-five job. I had three daughters – twins in 2010, and then another daughter in 2014. And once they started athletics, I started coaching right away,” Bardwell said. “I had talked to the (South Hadley) athletic director and rec department… and said if anything ever comes up with volleyball, I’m interested, I want to get back in. It was hard to not do it.”
Once her daughters were old enough to play sports, Bardwell got back into coaching, but it took her a while to get back onto a high school volleyball court. She heard that Tigers’ head coach Corey Koske might be retiring soon, so she took a position as the team’s junior varsity coach in the interim. A couple years later, the varsity position opened up, and Bardwell was finally back where she belonged.
But since she’d moved up to the varsity job, she needed to find a new junior varsity coach. It’s a role that can be hard to fill – coaches are working with younger players, sometimes kids who have never played the game before. Bardwell needed a coach with an excellent grasp on the fundamentals. She grabbed the phone and called the first person she could think of – her mom.
“It was kind of obvious to me, there was nobody else I was going to ask… except maybe my sister, Heather,” Bardwell said. “I asked (my mom), will it be weird, me being varsity and you being JV? And she said, no… that’s a lot, that’s a lot more than just coaching. She (said) I would love to coach JV and help develop players that will come up to varsity. It was just a perfect match.”
Bardwell didn’t want just anyone coaching the junior varsity team, because she had a long-term vision for the program. She wasn’t just here to coach – she wanted to build a culture of success, like what she and her mom had at Amherst when she was still a player in the ‘90s. She needed someone with the same buy-in as her, and who better to bring on board than her mom.
Riley herself was a prolific volleyball player in her day. She was the founder of the club volleyball team at UMass, earned an invite to try out for the U.S. Olympic volleyball team and had decades of experience coaching players in a variety of sports, including volleyball.
But Riley knew firsthand how much work it was being a varsity coach, and was more than happy to play a supporting role while Bardwell stepped into the spotlight.
“I understand the level of varsity coach, and know what that person is responsible for. My position is JV (coach) and I’m there to support her,” Riley said.
Now, more than 25 years later, the mother-daughter duo are back on the court together. Despite their different titles, Bardwell and Riley are very much working as a team to change the culture at South Hadley. So far, it’s working – after going winless last season, the Tigers won six of their first seven matches this year and sit at 7-3 overall, a remarkable 180 from the 2022-23 season. There’s still plenty of room to improve, but the players have bought in to the changes.
“I really like her as a coach… she has a lot of structure, and she has an agenda,” South Hadley junior Isabella Schaeffer said of Bardwell. “Each practice is something new, we gain more strength, we gain more confidence and we gain more knowledge of the game.”
Schaeffer added that Riley has been a big help too, particularly when it comes to working with the back row defense and the team’s setters.
It seems the Tigers are improving every day under the tutelage of Bardwell and Riley, and they’re hoping that they can keep the team on an upward trajectory for years to come. And next year, Bardwell’s oldest daughters will be freshmen at South Hadley – it’s possible they could have three generations on the court very soon.
Though it’s still their first year with the team, it seems clear that Bardwell and Riley are well on their way to leaving their mark on another western Mass. volleyball program for years to come.
Hannah Bevis can be reached at hbevis@gazettenet.com. Follow her on Twitter @Hannah_Bevis1.