Rose Powell

I attribute my success to watching my kids go to college and then come back to give back to the program. That is the most important thing to me. I see my kids go through the program, go through the process, and then they come back to give back. Now I see coaches, some of my kids that have played under me, all over the country now coaching. I've got coaches in Texas, Indiana, here in Alabama, Georgia, all over that's coaching now. That is nice whenever I go to these big tournaments still and one of them will run up and jump in my arms and say, hey, Coach Rose, I'm coaching now, and I'm loving every bit of it, and I understand exactly what you were saying back in the day.

The best career advice I've ever received is to continue doing what you love, as long as you love doing it.

In my industry, I would tell young women to stay patient. Remember that the process is long, it's not a short race, it's always a long race for us. When we are in this process and we are developing the next generation of coaches and the next generation of young women, not only in the coaching field but in every field, they still have to be strong, and they have to be bold, they have to be energetic, they have to know their field and know where they are, and not be afraid to step out on things. That's what I would tell them.

The biggest challenge for me is marketing myself as an Olympian with coaching experience. This volleyball and club scene is very, very aggressive and very challenging because parents are depending on coaches to get their kids to the next level, and sometimes they don't see that it is a process. They'll get upset and bounce around from club to club or even go start their own club. It's a big market, a huge market, and just getting out there being able to say we've got a great product over here. Athletics in today's world is different - when I was coming up there was no club volleyball, we just played. Now there's club volleyball everywhere and it's expensive. People want cheap sometimes, but you have to pay the coaches to train these kids because my club can range anywhere from 160 kids to 240 kids, and I can't coach them all, so I have to train coaches. The coaches want to get paid because it's not rec league, the parents want great things happening for the kids, and sometimes they don't realize it takes money to do that. The opportunities we offer for these kids is the opportunity to make new friends, learn discipline, organization, and a lot of these kids are looking to go to college. I tell them there is a level of play for everybody. My level was Olympic level, but not everybody is an Olympian, not everybody is a D1 player, but there's junior college, there's D2, D3, everybody has an opportunity. It's how you manage through that opportunity to get better. It takes hard work. People want to be great, but are they willing to do what it takes to be great? It takes more than 2 days a week, it takes making sure you're eating well, doing great things, weight training. All those things is a part of the process.

God first, for sure, in everything that we're doing. My husband and I, it's God first, my family. I have two wonderful boys, William Powell and Brandon Powell, two wonderful boys who have done great things and went off to college to play basketball, and both of them have great jobs. The next thing would be making sure that these kids see that there is discipline, that there's organization, being organized, being able to sustain whenever things get rough, because things will get rough for them sometimes. We're counting on each other whenever we're on that court so that we can be successful. That success not always come right away, but it is a process that we believe in the process, we believe in developing strong young women, no matter what race, color, or whatever, but developing strong young women to be able to step out into the world and be able to manage.