Woodside’s girls volleyball team has a new face for the 2025-26 school year, varsity head coach Brendan Wang.
Wang has been coaching youth volleyball for nearly 10 years, coaching at Academy Volleyball for six of those 10, coaching several teams to win a USA Volleyball Junior National Medal. He now steps into the head coaching role at Woodside.
“I’ve been playing volleyball for 14 years now,” Wang said. “I fell in love with the sport because it was a sport that felt like it needed the whole team to be on the same page to execute. Even with other team sports, normally, if you have one really good player, it’s enough, but volleyball is one of those sports where, even if you have one good player, it doesn’t matter. You need a whole team.”
To Wang’s players, such as senior Kaitlynn Fukuhara, this mentality is apparent in Wang’s coaching style.
“Now he’s really trying to emphasize us working as a team and working together, because we have a problem where we were kind of [playing] independently,” Fukuhara said. “So he really tries to emphasize that we need to work as a whole because it’s not a one-person sport. It’s a six-person sport.”
However, while Wang emphasizes the importance of operating as a team, he still focuses on how his players can improve themselves. Fukuhara credits Wang with making adjustments in order to win.
“His coaching sounds a lot more formatted. He shows us exactly what to do and how we should do it, what adjustments to make; it’s a lot more structured,” Fukuhara said. “He’s not gonna sugarcoat anything, and he’s very blunt, which I like.”
While Wang puts an emphasis on cohesiveness as a team, Wang credits competitive drive as the one main factor that is important to him.
“Competitive drive is the fastest way to get better,” Wang said. “And the fastest way to become engrossed in something that you love is to compete not just with yourself, but with other people. Having a little bit of that ego where you’re not allowing your peers to be better than you. You have to be one step above.”
Wang pushes his players and the team to have a competitive drive on the court.
“No matter what the score is, we fight every point. No matter what the opponent is doing, we always try to find answers,” Wang said.
Wang continues to look ahead to long-term goals. Goals that develop Woodside’s volleyball program for future success.
“The long-term goal is for the program as a whole [is] a team that can focus on challenging each other to get better,” Wang said. “To push each other to get better, and to be on the same page regarding what they want to do in practices and matches.”
