Interview with Beth Launiere on Preparing for NCAA Playoffs and Avoiding Player Burnout

2019 was a landmark year for Beth Launiere. Not only did it mark her 30th season as the Head Volleyball Coach at the University of Utah, but Launiere was named the Pac-12 Coach of the Year and led her team to the program’s fourth Sweet 16 performance. The team’s match up against BYU in the second round of the NCAA playoffs has gone down in Ute volleyball history.

In the 2019 NCAA tournament your team beat BYU 3-0 at BYU.  How did you prepare your team for that big match-up? 

There were a number of factors. We had very high goals for the season and expectations for ourselves. We were ready for the NCAA tournament. We finished 3rd in the PAC-12. We were ready to make a nice run (in the playoffs) and we felt really confident. We really thought that we had a shot at hosting, and found out that we were going to BYU for the 3rd time in 4 years. I couldn’t have been more proud of my team for the way they handled that. I had very strong leadership.  Right from the start they were like, it’s a bummer but it doesn’t matter. I’ve been doing this long enough now to know that if you start getting too worried about where you’re sent and what your seed might be, then you’re probably starting from behind right off the bat. So we just had a really great mindset going into the tournament right away.  We took the mentality of wherever, whoever and whatever it takes.

We took the mentality of wherever, whoever and whatever it takes.

I felt like it was a calumniation of the whole season, what our goals were and what our expectations were.  We had a plan in place for the season.  Part of executing our plan was to make a nice run. Losing can be a great motivator too and we had lost to them the year before.

There was a lot of media and our fans that tried to make a big deal out of it. Everyone was like hey congratulations and I’m so sorry that you have to go back to BYU.  We just made a decision really early that we wouldn’t let anybody talk to us about the seeding issue.  I was nervous because we had won a big five set match the night before against Illinois and we were tired.  It was one of those things where less is more. We kept our scouting very limited. We let them have time for a nap after a little serve and pass. We were just ready to go. 

How do you prepare your team game after game throughout the long season and prevent player burnout?

The grind of a season is so great that every week you’re looking to find that place where you can play fresh, free and have a great weekend. Especially in the PAC-12. Every week is a different beast and it’s a long season. Sometimes you just grind matches out and that’s what you expect. And then sometimes you have something that’s really exciting happening, like the NCAA tournament.

We had a weekend where we were celebrating my 30th year and we were retiring our first ever volleyball jersey in our arena – Kim Turner. Our team really bought into the excitement of that weekend and had a great week of preparation. At the end of the day it always comes down to if you have a great week of prep, you’re probably going to play really well on the weekend. If you don’t, if you’re good enough you can find a way to grind it out but if you’re not then you’re going to lose. We beat UCLA 3-0 that weekend too and it was a flawless match.

I think it was a combination of you’re constantly doing the work that you do and then you find some places within the season that are you know, players get really fired up about. Maybe it’s an opponent you’re playing that the players like to play. We seem to play pretty well against Washington. We have great matches with them all the time. So in the course of a long season, it’s important to find weekends that are a little different than the other ones because otherwise it’s just a grind weekend after weekend. I would say that UCLA match was pretty similar to our BYU match in that we just came out, we executed, we had a great mindset and a great week of practice.