Steve Aird sits in a sizable chair in his XFINITY Center office, Maryland spelled out across the chest of his white shirt. He speaks in a style similar to the way he coaches: direct and honest yet subtly engaging. He comes off as a compound of charisma and confidence, possessing the kind of personality that simultaneously earns respect and makes you feel respected. The sign outside his office to the right of the doorframe is a symbol of that earned respect. It reads “Head Coach-Volleyball”.
Less than 24 hours before, the head coach watched his team take Minnesota to five sets in an eventual loss Wednesday, a gritty performance that could not be envisaged a month ago. In 48 hours he will be getting ready for an even harder challenge – his second regular-season matchup against Penn State and his former mentor, Russ Rose. After that, there will only be two games left in his inaugural season.
In its first Big Ten campaign, the Terrapins have gone 9-19 with conference play treating them especially rough. Aird knew coming in that turning the Terps into a contender in this conference would be a challenge, a big change from his time winning championships as an assistant coach at Penn State. He says he never expected to be in this situation, the leader of a Big Ten program that doesn't wear royal blue and white, yet here he sits.
What has he learned in the days, the months, the matches leading up to this, the brink of his first offseason?
“I'm learning patience, but I also have two kids who are 4 and 2 [years old] so the patience thing I'm definitely getting better at no matter what.”
There's the charisma.
“But I think the number one thing is that I'm more convinced than ever that we're going to get it done here.”
There's the confidence.
***
Aird did not have lifelong love affair with volleyball that many would assume when they see his passion on the sidelines. Growing up, he did not partake in any youth sports because he experienced cardiovascular problems caused by slow-developing lungs. But over time he worked on his weakness, strengthening his lungs by constantly swimming in the pool that his parents had built in the backyard.
That commitment paid off in the 9th grade when he showed up to volleyball tryouts at his high school in London, Ontario, and immediately impressed.
“In the first week of the tryouts, I found I had a sort of proficiency for it,” said Aird. “It was just a thing that I picked up really quickly. The concepts of the game were really easy to me. And so, a year later I was on the junior national team.”
When the time came for the Aird to choose where he would play college volleyball, he knew that his best chances to reach the level of competition he sought lay south of the Canadian border. Penn State was his first visit and he fell in love with it instantly. It was fairly close to home and it could feed that desire he had to play against the best. So he became a Nittany Lion.
Four years and three national semi-final appearances later, Aird graduated college with a degree in business law, and initially liked the concept of potentially being involved with pro sports – maybe a Jerry Maguire type. But over time he realized that lifestyle wasn't for him so he shifted his goals. Now he aimed to be involved with “anything at the highest level of what they do.” What better pyramid to attempt to climb than the one he was most familiar with: volleyball.
That climb started early. In his senior season playing for the Penn State, Rose asked him to stay on after commencement as a graduate assistant for the women's team. He had always been the type of player that people would see out on the court giving tips to a teammate or adding a word of encouragement and remark 'he would be a good coach.'
“I was a pretty cerebral player. I was a better volleyball IQ player than I was an actual player; I was a better teammate than I was a player,” said Aird. “So I always ended up as the captain or the coach on the court, partly because physically I wasn't the best player, relative to the guys I was competing with.”
He used that coaching mentality to contribute what he could as a GA after graduation, but soon felt an urge to leave the campus he had called home for the last five years in search of something new.
“I needed experience,” Aird said simply. “I needed to know what it was like in other places.”
Turns out, it was rough in other places. In his first year as an assistant coach at Auburn, the Tigers went 1-27. But Aird says his experiences there taught him invaluable lessons on training and how to get through a rough patch. In 2005, he moved from Auburn to Cincinnati and two years later, in 2007, he found his way back to a familiar place: State College.
He returned to Penn State at the right time, serving as an assistant coach and director of volleyball in 2007, when the Nittany Lions won the national title, and in 2008 when they went undefeated on their way to a repeat performance.
In the spring of that undefeated year, he got a call from high school friend who was running a company called Complete Athlete and was seeking someone he could trust to help him steer his ever-growing ship. That desire to try something new kicked in again, and Aird and his wife, Brandy, packed up the car and drove across the country.
Aird became president of Complete Athlete, a role that he says taught him how to be a jack of all trades. His duties included marketing, training, writing, coaching and scouting. He also managed to explore other opportunities to further expand his impact on volleyball across the country.
“It was a really interesting time because we were young and scrambling. We wrote a children's book, we had a uniform company in China, we had the largest club in the U.S. in 12 cities and I was flying all over the country to teach coaches and teach players. It was the Wild West and it was phenomenal.”
The book he helped work on was called Blueprint of a Champion, the idea being to merge the “Chicken Soup” concept with the world of volleyball in an effort to teach young athletes about goal-setting and work ethic.
“My experiences in California certainly hardened me in the world of business,” he said. “It was an education and it was a wonderful time but there was a lot of late nights and tough lessons.”
So Aird decided to go back to building champions directly at Penn State. He returned to Happy Valley for the second time in 2012 and helped them win their sixth national championship in 2013. In January of that season, a month after Penn State took home the title, Maryland announced that they had hired Aird to take over as head volleyball coach.
The Terps had just finished the 2013-14 season at 13-19, a campaign that landed them in second-to-last place in their final season as an ACC competitor. But Aird looked far past that.
“The best part of the whole thing for me was that it was a huge opportunity,” said Aird. “I didn't think it was risky because I knew I could put the right people in place and, if given enough time, I could take it to where it needed to go. And then the administration here looked me in the eyes and said, 'Volleyball is going to matter,' and that was huge.”
Upon arrival, the 35-year-old knew that he had to be honest with himself and with his players. The first season is bound to be difficult for any team in a new conference, let alone one that is also adjusting to a new coach. So Aird formed his coaching style around the idea of supporting his players both on and off the court with the same honest, straight-forward approach.
“You can't sugarcoat things at this level – it's competitive athletics. And I'm trying to prepare them for life, not just for volleyball,” said Aird. “I don't want them to be average at anything. I want them to dominate school. I want them to be great daughters, great girlfriends. I want them to call their grandparents, to write their high school coaches and say 'thanks.' All those things that I think are important, I'm trying to teach them.”
With teaching also came learning. Aird was faced with the challenges any first-year coach has to overcome, the ones he tried his best to prepare for in all of his different stops throughout the volleyball world. The road was always going to be bumpy,-he knew that. But the idea of traveling that road, of rebuilding that road, was what drew him to College Park.
“I love the challenge,” he said with a smile. “It's the beauty of it, right?”
The decision to come to Maryland was on par with the rest of the choices in his life: high risk, high reward. Aird prides himself on his appetite for the bold.
“I always wanted to bite off more than I could chew and a lot of people thought I wasn't good enough,” he said. “My family's thing has always been: if you fall flat on your face, you can crash on our couch. So I've always been pretty aggressive about my life choices.”
***
Steve Aird is a man that cares about a lot of things – that much is clear in any conversation held with him. But one thing he doesn't care about is what other people think of his decision, especially the one that landed him behind a desk in the XFINITY Center on a Thursday afternoon.
“I read quotes and I read people's opinions and it's, 'Maryland's this, Maryland's that,' and it just makes me smile,” said Aird. “Because I know how the movie ends.”
There's the confidence.
Michael Errigo, a sophomore journalism major at the University of Maryland, is a contributing writer to umterps.com.
