Volleyball Voices interviews Air Force Academy Coach Penny Lucas-White

I'm here at the AVCA (American Volleyball Coaches Association) conference in sacramento where I've been attending the first seminar -the Minority Coaches workshop. Tomorrow one of the featured speakers is Penny Lucas White, one of a handful (and I mean that literally) of black female Division 1 Head coaches in the NCAA. A former teammate on the National Team, Penny shares with Volleyball Voices what its like to coach in Division 1 and what’s expected of prospective student-athletes that are thinking of attending.

VV: For a female athlete what’re the differences between playing at the Air Force Academy and playing at a regular Division I university.

PLW: The kids that come to the Air Force Academy carry a workload of 18-23 accredited hours. They also have a very strenuous regimen. They start their day at 5:30 and they don’t end it until around 10:30 at night. These are kids that’re academically driven which are most of them all of them really. They can stay up until midnight or 1a.m. studying. It’s so highly competitive in the classroom. You’re trying to graduate at the top of your class-so you can prove your worth in the field you eventually want to go into.

I have a kid who wants to be a pilot-I have one that wants to get her masters, now she’s currently competing for the MIT scholarship. There are all these different scholarships so the workload-the academic load is first.

Believe it or not the academics are first here because the standards of the Air force academy and the GPA they must uphold/maintain is higher than the NCAA rules. They could possibly risk eligibility according to the academy standards. These are the types of kids that’re in the top 10% in the country. We travel with tutors, they travel and play. They’ve been doing it-they volunteered to do this-that’s how they look at it. You volunteer to go to the military. You volunteer to come to the Air Force Academy.

VV: When an athlete considers coming to the Air force Academy-what is it that you most want them to know about playing for this team?

PLW: That we’re family oriented that academics come first, the first thing I tell my team when I spoke to them tonight is that “we’re young but we’re right there.” I give them off on Mondays because they have to catch up academically-because we go back on the road to travel. When they get a day off-their day is spent in learning labs with their teachers, their tutors, they’re doing all the extras.

So my message would be “I want you to be academically motivated, then I want you to be self driven, then I want you to be selfless.

VV: Name or explain any recruiting challenges.

PLW: That’s probably our hardest and most difficult challenge of all. We can walk in a gym at the same time another coach walks in and the ACT score to get into his school may be a 19 or 20, so that means he can look at the whole gamut of almost 75% of the kids if not all that’re in the gym. Well, my dilemma is the kid has to have a 26 ACT score, be in the top 10% of their class and they have to have all these extracurricular activities on their resume (that they are doing). They have to be community oriented, they have do the whole gamut…only then can I look at that kid. It takes a year for these kids to become eligible to get into the academy because they need to have a congressional nomination, a congressman must nominate them…must give them a “nom” to get into the academy or they can receive a presidential nomination into the academy . They have approximately 10 to 16,000 kids fighting to get into the academy…and we only accept 1000 a year.

I’m currently carrying a roster of 21 but I only travel with 14 because f the attrition rate which is so high. You may see these same young ladies here this year…you can come in with a freshman class of eight players but by the time they graduate there may be two left that are seniors together. It doesn’t mean that they didn’t graduate, they stayed at the academy, its just tough juggling academics and athletics.

VV: Describe a day in the life with an Air Force Academy athlete.

PLW: Wow they start in the morning at 5:30…they are getting it dopne. They carry a workload of 18-23 accredited hours. Then they come down to the gym and work out like a Division 1 athlete and they are going here four hours a day.

VV: Can you give me an hourly breakdown of what a day entails?

PLW: I’m going to let you hear it from a sophomore, this is Michelle Harrington at the Air Force Academy. She is going to give you the schedule of a normal day at the academy giving you a snapshot of what it’s like for a freshman and then for a sophomore

ML: “I usually get up at 6:30 Freshman first thing have duties and tasks that they have to do and learn each week, so they recite anything that’s going on..thoughts for the day, they have to learn knowledge like quotes of famous people… they have to stand at attention, they do this and get tested on it every week and then move on to learning new things. They study until about 7:15 At 7:25.

So I have classes from 7:50 to 11:43 in the morning. Then we have noon march formation. Basically every sporting squad at the academy will form up and everybody marches. It’s not an exercise, we’ve already learned how to march, but we’ll have 9 upperclassmen ina row with a squadron commander up front. Everybody will line up behind them, they’ll start the music and we’ll march in step..its all to music and people will come and watch. We start marching at noon and finish at 12:30. but things vary on Wednesdays we usually have a parade which takes longer and has a lot more ceremony to it. On Thursdays since Im a sophomore I will be assigned a freshman to work with to teach them things that they will need for the next year, anything they need help with basically you are a mentor to them.

After that we’ll have lunch and people can go get extra instruction. We’ll meet with teachers or do homework after lunch.

Then I go down to practice, we start at 2:30 but I will go down to get treatment at 1:30. Practice is usually 2:30 to 6:30. I go get ice then I’ll catch dinner (5pm to 7pm )and then come back home to study all night usually to midnight and then get up and do it all over again. That’s mostly for a sophomore.

The freshman have a lot of training where it can be physical or they need to be mentored it just kind of depends. They have a lot of extra stuff where they have to deal with being at attention a lot more, we are getting them to learn more military stuff so they can adjust to being here.

VV: Players always choose champions to emulate or copy to improve their game are there any coaches you look at as mentors for inspiration./

PLW: Absolutely. I still look to my high school coach because she has been a mentor, she is an athletic director now. She is the athletic director at Episcopal High School in Baton Rouge Louisiana. I chitchat with my colleagues that we bounce and exchange ideas off of each other every week Ruth Lawanson, head coach at Angelo State, Rose Magers-Powell at Martin Methodist and Deitre Collins at Cornell we talk to each other constantly. We give each other drill, we recommend and tell each other about the books we are reading all the time, year round.

Coach thank you for your time and good luck to you.

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