Be About The Mantra

When walking around the practice courts at the XFINITY Center Pavilion, you’ll hear a common phrase from Ryan Ammerman: “Be about the mantra.”

In a sport like volleyball, which is defined by split-second decisions, there isn’t much time to process everything while passing, hitting, or blocking. Ammerman devised his mantra mindset so that amid the chaos, Maryland’s volleyball players wouldn’t overthink what goes into every motion on the court and would only think about one quick tagline to remember their job for any action.

“On the volleyball court, there’s a million things to be thinking about when the ball comes to you,” Ammerman said. “Every one of the players came up with their own mantras for the different aspects of the game so that instead of thinking about everything that goes into an action, they can simplify it and remember one thing.

Ammerman knows a thing or two about being about the mantra. As a young kid growing up in Denver, Ammerman aimed high with his ultimate goal in life. He wanted more than anything else to be an Olympian, representing the USA in any sport that would take him.

“For some reason, wanting to play in the Olympics was the dream,” Ammerman said. “I was watching them on TV, and I didn’t know what sport I wanted to play in, but that was a goal early on.”

No matter where he had to go, driving hours to practice or moving an ocean away from his family in Denver, Colorado, Ammerman had the innate belief that as a men’s volleyball player, he could play on the biggest stage and compete for the ultimate prize in the sport, an Olympic gold medal.

Those childhood ambitions have fueled Ammerman, more commonly known on the sidelines as Ammo, to where he is today, serving as a first-year assistant coach for Maryland volleyball. He has played at the pinnacle of men’s professional volleyball, nearly achieving those dreams of playing in the Olympics had life not intervened. 

And now, as a coach, Ammerman is working to help the Terps climb into the ranks of the ever-competitive Big Ten volleyball landscape, where Maryland will face off against players who have Olympic aspirations of their own. Through his experience of coaching and playing at just about every level of men’s volleyball under the sun, he hopes to carry the competitive drive that has taken him to nearly every level of competition.

“As a coach, I would describe myself as someone who is very competitive but curious a lot about teaching athletes how to be competitive,” Ammerman said. “I think it's a hard skill to teach, and I don't think I was the best at it as a player. I have a lot of empathy and a lot of knowledge, so I spend a lot of time doing that and it’s something I care about a lot as a person.”

His competitive drive and long-term vision started as early as high school. While Ammerman played several different sports and watched his seven siblings play many different sports, he knew he had to pick one to focus on for his Olympic aspirations. As a freshman in high school, Ammerman made the conscious decision to play boy’s volleyball not as a sanctioned high school sport but as a part of a club team for his school and a traveling club squad.

“I wanted to play a sport of some kind at the next level and I thought I could achieve my goal of playing in the Olympics,” Ammerman said. “But I had a better chance of playing the Olympics as a volleyball player instead of a basketball player. So I quit basketball after my freshman year to just focus on volleyball.”

Men’s volleyball did not have an established culture during Ammerman’s journey to college, as there was just one boy's volleyball club in the entire state of Colorado. As a result, Ammerman would make a two-hour drive from his home in Parker, CO, up I-70 to Boulder for every practice, and several of his teammates would make even longer treks, with some coming in from Kansas just for a chance to compete at the club level.

Ammerman made the most of his opportunity at the club level, with his team scoring a second-place finish in a major club tournament to get on recruiting radars at the collegiate level. He was scouted to play as either a hitter or a setter, but since he wanted to compete beyond the college level, he chose to be a setter since there was a higher chance he could have a better career in that position.

Out of the many schools that recruited him, Ammerman chose to attend the University of California-Irvine to make a name for himself. The Anteaters didn’t have a championship pedigree when Ammerman arrived in southern California. Still, he picked the school since he believed the program had the potential to become a west-coast powerhouse that could provide a springboard into the US national team.

“I thought that if I got good enough at setting I would have a chance to play on the national team as a setter, so that was more important than winning the national championship,” Ammerman said. “But the national championship was probably like this number two goal.”

By the end of his tenure, both of those goals were achieved, as Ammerman was on the roster for each of UC Irvine’s first two NCAA national championships in 2007 and 2009, and he made the US national team following his stellar five-year run in Irvine.

However, Ammerman didn’t start out as the star of the program. In fact, he only held the starting setter role for the team in the final two years with the program and played in a reserve role during UCI’s first national title season in 2007. Brian Thornton, who is now an assistant coach at Oklahoma, held the spot above him on the depth chart, and Ammerman used that time to learn from how the program’s all-time assist leader made his decisions.

“He was one of the best decision makers I've ever been around and so I was able to just sit there and watch his decisions,” Ammerman said. “I was able to then figure out why he made those decisions on my own from the sidelines and ask him questions about why he said certain things when he did. And then at the same time, work on my game in the background and work on my skills, but a big thing was the decision making, who to set and when and why.”

Once Ammerman found his way to the starting role, he became a star for the Anteaters, leading them to a second NCAA championship in 2009, earning AVCA First Team All-American honors and the NCAA Most Outstanding Player award for his dominant performance in the national championship win over USC.

After concluding his collegiate career, Ammerman continued his quest to represent the US in the Olympics by playing professional volleyball overseas, playing all across Europe, and representing teams in Italy, Spain, and Croatia, among others. While he was far from his home in Colorado, he felt it was the best place to be to compete for a spot on the national team roster since there wasn’t a professional men’s volleyball league stateside.

“Every country has its own league and it's very popular over there,” Ammerman said. “It's one of the top sports over there after soccer, obviously, so it's pretty fun getting to play in some pretty fun environments in front of a lot of fans and the talent that you play against is top notch, so it's definitely a fun place to play.”

Ammerman played for five seasons at the professional level in Europe and the same length with the US Men’s National Team between 2010-15, helping the American side win the Pan Am Cup Championship in 2012. To play at that level was a high honor for him, knowing the caliber of talent that surrounded him and knowing he was of the same caliber.

“I had a dream when I was 15 and felt like I did about as much as I could have in terms of trying to reach it,” Ammerman said. “It was pretty cool getting to be in that gym every single day with those athletes and coaching staff and you striving to be a part of something that was so big and so cool just to have a dream come true and I was really fortunate to be able to stay healthy enough and to be able to achieve it.”

However, just before Ammerman was set to compete for a spot on the US Men’s National Team roster for the 2016 Rio Olympics, his playing career was cut short in the blink of an eye. At just 29 years old, Ammerman learned he had a heart condition that prevented him from playing volleyball at the competitive level.

In the months following his medical retirement, the life Ammerman had known for the last decade came to a grinding halt. After traveling the US and the world playing volleyball at the highest level, he moved back to Colorado, where he initially had no intention of returning to the world of volleyball. 

But when a door had closed in Ammerman’s life, a window opened that led to the rebirth of his life in volleyball.

“I was numb for a while,” Ammerman said. “I was devastated and it was a rough few months but because of that, I moved home and started coaching my sister and my cousin and as a side job and fell in love with coaching started me on this path of coaching volleyball. So in a way it's a big part of the reason why I'm where I am now. So it turned out to be a good thing.”

While helping out with his sister’s team, he picked up a sales and marketing job to pay the bills. Still, less than a year after his full-time volleyball career came to an end, his full-time coaching career began at Front Range Volleyball Club in Englewood, CO, where he worked with club volleyball veteran Jim Miret to enter into the world of coaching.

“He's one of the more curious people I've ever been around and he taught me pretty much everything I know about coaching,” Ammerman said. “So I got pretty much a master's degree in coaching from him in terms of how to coach skills, how to coach systems, how to coach teams, how to coach competitiveness, strength training, endurance training.”

Ammerman has had the luxury of being around some of the best coaches in the business In addition to Miret, his old college coach, John Speraw, served as his head coach at UC Irvine before going on to coach the US Men’s National Team for the 2016 and 2020 Olympics. One of Speraw’s assistant coaches with the Anteaters, David Kniffin, also won an NCAA national championship as head coach at UC Irvine in 2013 and hired Ammerman for his first collegiate coaching gig at his alma mater in 2022.

“I’m very fortunate because those three people are first and foremost great people and great friends, and then the fact that they’re all so curious and competitive all helped me a lot, so I’m very thankful for that,” Ammerman said.

After just a season at UCI, Ammerman started putting out his résumé for women’s teams in the NCAA and joined the Maryland staff earlier this spring in hopes of coaching in the Big Ten Conference and growing his career profile. Maryland head coach Adam Hughes found that Ammerman had the ideal experience needed to help the Terps reach their highest potential.

“One of the things that I think really helps him present and be able to coach our student-athletes is that he’s been in a lot of scenarios where he was a star player or he was a backup player,” Hughes said. “It happened when he was in college and when he was with the men’s national team, and he had to work all the way through. His ability to play at a high level and his passion for coaching put together really helps the team relate to him.”

Ammerman has brought several new ideas to the XFINITY Center Pavilion for practices from his days as a club coach and his decade of experience as a college and professional player. In his drills, he seeks to simulate match situations as much as possible by adding layers of competition into practice. 

“The thing he’s trying to add to us is that when we’re developing our student-athletes, there’s a pressure constraint there,” Hughes said. “He likes to sprinkle competition into the drills any way he can so that you do have that added pressure of execution feeling that is the most important part of the student-athlete’s development.”

In his role as assistant coach, Ammerman hopes to pass along the lessons he learned as a volleyball player at the highest level by showing that winning is a skill that can be developed by meeting the team where they’re at.

“I think I can tell stories about how hard it was for me and the lessons I’ve learned,” Ammerman said. “I can tell stories about the players and coaches I’ve worked with in the past and relate it back to them to find parallels between those experiences and theirs so they know that they’re not the first athlete to feel the way they feel and they can compete past those obstacles.”

Through the game of volleyball, Ammerman has learned how to bring the best out of himself and others, setting other people up for success while being able to share in that success himself. As Ammo enters the thick of Maryland’s Big Ten slate for the first time in his coaching career, he hopes he can set the Terps up for success this season and for many seasons to come.

“Volleyball has taught me how to be present, it’s taught me how to be a good communicator and it’s taught me how to be a good teammate,” Ammerman said. “It’s taught me how to be everything that I am as a coach and as a person.”