He was in his second year at the helm of a pro team (the Vienna Hotvolleys), an opportunity that came after a nice playing career at BYU (1991-93) and on club teams in Finland and Japan (1993-95) and an assistant coaching job at BYU under Carl McGown (1995-2001) that produced NCAA championships in 1999 and 2001. The first year in Austria, the team, which was filled with talented American players like future gold medalists Reid Priddy (OH) and Rich Lambourne (libero), won the Austrian League Championship. The second year, the roster wasn’t as well


stocked, and the team sputtered. The owner fired a couple of players, then fired McCutch- eon, saying, “I can’t have the players think it’s their fault.” On his way out the door, McCutcheon


wasn’t sure how he should feel, but he did know he’d done everything he could – “worked myself ragged,” he says – so he accepted that it was time to go in a different direction and viewed it as a new challenge rather than something to worry about. “Get- ting fired was not a highlight of my ca- reer, but it wasn’t as devastating as I imag- ined it could be,” he says. “The sun still came up the next day, and I immediately started looking for a new job. It was as much a beginning as it was an end.” And it wasn’t long afterward that he joined Doug Beal’s staff as a full- time assistant coach for the U.S. Men’s National Volleyball Team.


Thinking and re-thinking the game Hugh’s wife,


to their two-and-a-half-year-old son, Andrew, and their eight-month-old daughter, Annika, so Wiz could play it for them when he was on extended road trips, which sometimes were weeks on end.) “His brain never stops,” says Wiz, who


played on the 2004 Athens Olympic Games and was captain of her college team at UCLA for three seasons. “He’s always thinking, always trying to make things better.” His ever-evolving volleyball philosophy


was shaped early on when he played on a New Zealand club team while also representing his country on the junior national team and, later, the senior national team. At 18, he was the club team’s youngest member. Most of his team- mates were in their late 20s and early 30s, so he learned, and he also developed an appreciation for what a solid team felt like and also for the importance of teamwork, which he stresses to this day.


At BYU, he received a bachelor’s degree in


physical education, then a master’s in exercise science, then an MBA. As a player and, later, as an assistant coach, he soaked in McGown’s teachings, which placed a premium on training that is specific to the very movements and tasks that players need to perform in matches. “Hugh adheres to the principles of motor


learning,” says Karch Kiraly, who was Mc- Cutcheon’s top assistant for the 2009 to 2012 Olympic quadrennial with the U.S. Women’s Team and is now the head coach. “You do things that maximize transfer and follow the laws of specificity. For instance, you wouldn’t take a lot of golf swings to practice playing vol- leyball. You practice things that are specific to the game.” That specificity includes lots of competi-


tion. Rather than just reps, McCutcheon’s practices are heavy on drills designed to look like a volleyball game. There’s always a winner


Elisabeth “Wiz” McCutcheon, says she’s more of a night person than Hugh. But early in their marriage, when Hugh’s eyes would pop open at 4 in the morning and he would begin talking volleyball, she had to tell him that 4 a.m. wasn’t her best hour for volleytalk. Eventually, the USA staff got him a digital recorder so he could preserve his ideas and let his wife get a full night’s sleep. (He also used it to read bedtime stories


McCUTCHEON MAGIC: From 2009 to 2012, McCutcheon coached the U.S. Women’s National Volleyball Team to a 107-33 record and the No. 1 ranking in the world. (Photo: FIVB)


“If you’re going to achieve a team goal,


you can’t be self-interested,” he says. “You’ve got to act in the best interests of the team. And there are a lot of different personalities on a team, and they deal with that part differently. So, as a coach, you have to pick the lock to make them understand how they can positively influence the team.”


and a loser, and teams battle to achieve clearly defined goals. “Hugh would incorporate situational


training in most of our drills,” says setter Lloy Ball, a four-time Olympian and the starter on the Beijing gold medal team. “Points would be manipulated so you were always playing at a disadvantage. In one drill, we start at 24-all


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