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A former assistant coach at St. Francis and Vassar will now take over the program at Lees-McRae.
The Lees-McRae athletics department announced during the weekend that it hired Henry Chuang to be its new men’s volleyball head coach for the upcoming season.
“We found a men’s volleyball coach whose natural progression was to become a head coach in Henry,” athletics director Craig McPhail said in a statement. “His experience working with men’s volleyball players at the collegiate level and ability to develop relationships as well as talents were exceptional.”
Chuang spent the last two year as an assistant coach with Vassar, which ended the 2015 NCAA Division III season at 18-13 and reached conference tournament quarterfinals. In addition, Chuang spent the 2013 season as the interim head coach for the Vassar women’s volleyball team.
Before arriving to Vassar, Chuang was an assistant coach at St. Francis for six seasons. He also helped lead the Red Flashes to four EIVA Tournament appearances, including advancing to the 2009 conference tournament semifinals.
“I would like to thank Mr. McPhail and President Barry Buxton for this wonderful opportunity to work with the men´s volleyball team and to be a part of the athletics family at Lees-McRae,” Chuang said in a statement. “I have spoken with the team and everyone is as excited as I am for the upcoming season and I know we will accomplish some great things as we work to meet the goals that we set as a team. I look forward to the future and helping this team contend for the Conference Carolinas’ title.”
Chuang will replace Dave Schmidlin who spent the last two seasons to the Bobcats head coach.
Lees-McRae finished last season in ninth place in the Conference Carolinas and for one of the first times in its program history did not qualify for the conference tournament. The Bobcats return a majority of starters from last year’s team but will have to replace the outside attacker Bardy Markle, the 2015 Conference Carolinas Player of the Year.