NORTHAMPTON — The 2028 Paralympic Summer Games in Los Angeles will feature at least one local connection in Smith volleyball head coach Greg Walker.
Walker guided Team USA’s Men’s National Sitting Team to a spot in the Games after qualifying at last month’s World ParaVolley Men’s World Championships in Hangzhou, China. Walker, who has been in charge at Smith since 2020, helped Team USA achieve its best finish at the World Championships in program history after taking fifth-place out of 16 total teams.
“I think the pathway to get there was more special for this group, our veteran players and I know, personally, for me,” Walker said.
Sitting volleyball is exactly how it sounds: athletes must remain seated on the floor at all times. Therefore, the net is significantly shorter, standing just three feet off the ground, while the court is 10 x 6 meters.
Although, the game mirrors standing volleyball with the three-contact rule, plus sets are played to 25 points in a best-of-five format.
A decade after taking over head coaching responsibilities, Walker will be making his second Paralympic Games appearance following Team USA’s qualification at the 2016 Rio Paralympics.
In 2016, Team USA went 0-4 for an eighth-place finish. It hasn’t finished higher than sixth place (2004 Athens Paralympic Games) since the program’s inception.
Thirteen players make up Walker’s L.A. bound bunch, with players hailing from as far away as Everett, Washington, to as close to New England as Saugerties, New York.
At this year’s World Championships, Team USA made it through pool play with a 2-1 record, with wins against Ukraine and Rwanda, then picked off Canada in the Round of 16, 3-0.
Team USA could not get past perennial power Iran in the quarterfinals, falling 3-0, but beat Rwanda once again in the placement round, setting up a matchup with Germany in the fifth-place game.
Four years prior, these two teams met in the exact same match at the 2022 World Championships in Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina and it wasn’t pretty for Team USA as it got “annihilated,” according to Walker.
“I kept telling them, we’re here not only to qualify, we’re here to put these four years to rest,” Walker said. “It’s haunted me ever since.”
Team USA did just that by taking down the Germans in five sets, avoiding a 2-0 set collapse along the way, exercising its demons to punch its ticket to the 2028 Games.
“Everybody was rooting for us to do good, even all these teams across the world that had always sufficiently been the top five, top six, have immense amount of respect for what we accomplished,” Walker said.
That wasn’t always the case for Team USA’s Men’s National Sitting Team. The program was in disarray during the early years of Walker’s tenure, which began in 2013 as an assistant, but turning programs around is familiar territory for Walker.
He did it at the University of Southern California as an assistant, Sacred Heart for both the men’s and women’s teams and Alderson Broaddus in West Virginia, to name some.
It took time to build up a sustainable culture within the program, Walker said, with one of the most pressing challenges being making sure everyone was aligned on the same mission.
“When I [originally] got with this group, it wasn’t very professionalized, so getting athletes to understand, ‘hey, this is what it means to be a part of Team USA, what it means to be part of a senior national team’… it was hard growth,” Walker said.
Eventually, Walker’s process began to pay off as teams from across the world started to recognize Team USA’s commitment to improvement, so much so that teams now regularly train with Walker’s group.
“It takes a long time to build respectful relationships,” Walker said. “It’s been a journey and a process and I think that’s probably what I’m most proud of.”
Walker also credits a similar trajectory that has occurred at Smith, where the Bears have had a winning season every year Walker has been at the helm, which is a stark contrast to its 38-125 record the decade prior.
“Smith has bee the seventh program I’ve turned around,” Walker said. “So when you see these things at Smith and the USA team, they’re two of the programs I’ve had leadership on the longest. When you see those things go hand in hand, it’s a really cool thing.”
While Walker may make reviving programs look simple, that challenge doesn’t suit every coach. The Huntingdon, Pennsylvania native believes his style of connecting with his athletes as people, first, has led to his continued success.
“I think my biggest strength is understanding where people are and meeting them there, but then also finding, how can I get them to actually start seeing and believing that they are capable of more than what they thought they were,” Walker said.
Now with Opening Ceremonies for the 2028 Games almost exactly two years away, Walker has lofty expectations for his record-setting squad.
“My goal is I want to put a USA men’s team into the Hall of Fame,” Walker said. “Whether for me, it’s posthumously or whatever time… this team has truly gone from worst to being one of the top in the world and we’ve done it the right way.
“That’s kind of my vision for L.A., I want to go out on a podium, I want this team to earn their spot in the sport of volleyball as a team that basically cut all odds against them and stayed on task to doing what we needed to do,” Walker said.
