There are fewer stories now like those of Frank Solich, Barry Alvarez, Nate Oates, and John Cook, who all spent significant time as high school coaches before becoming head coaches of major college programs.
Years before he was Nebraska football head coach, Solich was a high school coach at Omaha Holy Name and Lincoln Southeast; before Alvarez won Big Ten titles with Wisconsin, the ex-Husker coached football at Lincoln Northeast, Lexington and Mason City (Iowa).
Oates was a math teacher and basketball coach for many years in Detroit before leading Alabama to the NCAA Final Four. Cook’s story is even more unique because he was forced into coaching high school volleyball as part of a teaching job, but then won four national championships in that sport while coaching Nebraska for 25 years.
But there’s one such story locally of a former high school coach now in college — new Creighton volleyball head coach Brian Rosen.
Ten years ago, Rosen was getting a $3,000 stipend to coach high school volleyball in North Carolina. Now he’s the head coach of a top-20 college program that on Tuesday will play in a match with 17,000 spectators in Omaha, likely setting an attendance record for a regular season indoor college match.
The Nebraska vs. Creighton series continues on Tuesday, with each team having new head coaches since the last matchup. Dani Busboom Kelly took over for Cook at Nebraska and Rosen for Kirsten Bernthal Booth after three years as an assistant there.
At Rosen’s previous stops, the volleyball team didn’t get much attention outside of the school community.
Now he’s a head coach in what’s sometimes referred to as the “volleyball state.” The 39-year-old Rosen thinks about all of the kids that will be at Tuesday’s match wondering if maybe they could play in a match like that someday, too.
“To see a state and an area just rally around these women and this sport is incredible,” Rosen said. “So on Tuesday to do that as the head coach of a program, there’s really no words for it.”
When Rosen speaks about his eight years as a high school coach, you’d believe he’d still be happy to be in the prep ranks. He still talks with some of those players, and they joke with him that he made them run too much.
“I loved it,” Rosen said. “I think one of my favorite things about coaching high school is whoever shows up for tryouts is who you get. So you have to figure out what positions people can play and be creative. And you have to make practices fun and enjoyable and you get to create these relationships with these 14 to 18-year old kids at such an impressionable age.
“Like the best state championship team I had, I only had one real middle blocker on it and three real outside hitters, so we were running a very unique offense that year saying these are my best players and I got to get them on the court somehow.”
Rosen grew up playing boys volleyball in Orlando, Florida. In college at the University of South Carolina, he did it all for the men’s club volleyball team — he played, coached and recruited players from the campus sand courts. He also helped coach the women’s club team.
As part of his sport management major, he did an internship with the NFL’s Carolina Panthers, and that’s how he got started coaching club and high school volleyball in North Carolina. One of the coaches was leaving their high school job at Charlotte Country Day School and encouraged him to apply.
“I was 23 years old and they hired me somehow,” Rosen said. “So I was a varsity program head coach at a really nice high school at 23 and we won two state championships and had a ton of success and I really thought that’s where I would stay. I loved it. I still love coaching those ages. I love camps, just to be around the younger age groups.”
Rosen helped high school players work through the recruiting process, and one of those connections is eventually what got him into college coaching as an assistant at Davidson.
“So many kids kept coming back with these miserable experiences,” Rosen said. “Like not getting what they were told in the recruiting process, whether it was not getting to study what they wanted or the coach being different than they thought they were getting. But I sent several kids to Davidson College and they kept coming back saying the opposite — great coach; I study what I want. So I started working camps for that coach just to get to know him better. He offered me the job three times I think and then the third time I finally let him convince me to jump back into college.”
At Country Day, Rosen won two state championships and had a record of 169-66. He also coached one year of high school at Providence (North Carolina) and made the state tournament.
But he wasn’t a certified teacher, so he had to find other full-time jobs that offered him flexibility.
“The whole time the coaching part was a stipend job,” he said. “I made $3,000 a year to coach. And then I just kept taking whatever job would let me leave at 3 o’clock to go coach, which is really hard. So I was a YMCA sports director at one point, I was a youth director. And then I was a long-term sub at the school, and then I think in the fourth year Country Day had a job so I could be there full time and I was a computer lab coordinator and sub.”
When Rosen was an assistant coach at Davidson he taught a PE class for the added income.
“I always like to joke that I was a college professor,” he said.
When he became a Division II head coach at Nova Southeastern, he took a pay cut from his previous job. The cost of living in Fort Lauderdale was more too, so he also coached two club teams for extra income.
In 2022 when Creighton had an assistant coach opening, former Creighton assistant Ryan Meek suggested Bernthal Booth look at Rosen. Bernthal Booth knew Rosen may not want to be an assistant again, but asked if he wanted to talk.
“At that point, I really just wanted to take the phone call because she’s a really big deal in our sport, and I thought it would be a great connection to have,” Rosen said.
Instead, he took the job, helped Creighton go 88-13 over three seasons and then got the head job in April.
His three years as an assistant included one other Creighton vs. Nebraska match in Omaha with 15,797 fans.
“Even the first time as an assistant, I just remember vividly Booth telling me, ‘Hey, make sure at some point during the game you just look around,’” Rosen said. “So I still remember during the anthem doing a 180 around me and just getting chills knowing that I’m about to be a part of a game where 15,000 people care.”
Reach the writer at 402-473-7435 or bwagner@journalstar.com. On Twitter @LJSSportsWagner.
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Brent Wagner
Husker volleyball/women’s basketball reporter
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