Even early in his retirement, former Windham Bombers’ volleyball Coach Michael Chaffee is not content with just taking long walks or playing pickleball. He is a teacher at his core and is eager to get back to his roots, having been announced as Cardinal’s new volleyball coach in April.
“It’s very exciting,” Chaffee told The Weekly Villager on July 11. “There is some nervous energy there. I have not been a head coach for a few years but I have some great assistants. We have a ton of kids in our program which is great. I am excited to see how my coaching approach works at a different place.”
After 33 years as a head coach and educator at Windham, Lordstown and Newbury High Schools, Chaffee acknowledged that it was a safe assumption that his coaching days were over. However, it was easier said than done for him to retire as a coach permanently and he was lured back to the sideline when he served as the Bombers’ junior varsity volleyball coach last year.
He said that when he heard that Cardinal had an opening for a girls’ varsity volleyball coach, he and Athletic Director Jimmy Soltis touched base and Chaffee is ready to give a 34th year of being a head volleyball coach a chance.
Although he is with a new program, he is not unfamiliar with his surroundingshaving coached in small communities throughout his career. According to him, coaching in smaller towns like Windham, Newbury and Lordstown has suited him well.
“I look at coaching at smaller schools as being family-oriented which is big for me,” he noted. “I have always had a lot of respect for Cardinal’s volleyball program. Since I started coaching in the early 1980s, they have always had a pretty successful volleyball program. We did not play them very often but we scrimmaged them over the years and it always reminded me of places where I was at.”
Chaffee said that the early returns have been encouraging as his new players have shown a dedication to volleyball while also demonstrating a willingness to learn.
As far as Chaffee is concerned, he learned a lot about coaching even when he competed in youth sports. Although he loved athletics, he spent more time on the bench than in the actual games but he used that time to analyze the flow and what his teammates were doing. After leaving his hometown Youngstown, Chaffee arrived at Windham as the new girls’ volleyball coach and sixth-grade English teacher.
For him, it was a huge adjustment having grown up in a much larger community in Youngstown compared to the small village of Windham. Plus, his only experience with volleyball was coaching an intramural squad.
Chaffee had previously served as an assistant track coach as his alma matter, Youngstown Ursuline, but did not a great working knowledge of volleyball, as there were no high school volleyball programs in Youngstown at the time.
Chaffee learned some things on the fly but at the same time tapped into his wide network of fellow coaches to better educate himself about the sport.
“I made a lot of connections with great coaches who were very anxious to take calls from me and tell me how they did it,” he noted. “I learned a lot from a lot of great coaches so that was a big difference for me because the first couple of years, we were just trying to figure it out but then we came upon a system that we were going to use.”
In Chaffee’s 26 years of coaching at Windham, he led the Bombers to 15 district championships and qualified as regional finalists four times. Although Windham was one of the smallest volleyball programs in Northeast Ohio, it embraced being the underdog and thrived on showing its competitors just how talented a small school could be.
“It was a community that I fell in love with and a community that we had great hard-working kids, and it is just a uniquely special place and we prided ourselves as always being the underdogs,” Chaffee said.
Chaffee took several breaks from coaching during his time at Windham but always returned to his post. After his 26th year of coaching at Windham in 2014, he moved onto coach at Newbury and spent three years there before he “retired”. After only three years away from coaching, Chaffee returned to Windham to serve as the junior varsity coach.
“I am an educator and coaching and teaching just go hand-in-hand,” he said. “You are motivating and you are educating and implementing a program. You are helping kids get better and working through disappointments with them and celebrating joys with them and teaching and coaching is just a great dynamic.”
