http://www.usatoday.com/sports/olympics/story/2011-12-26/hugh-mccutcheon-usa-volleyball/52231832/1?AID=4992781&PID;=4169806&SID;=1j0uep98a3x7b
IRVINE, Calif. For his team, as would any coach, Hugh McCutcheon is going to the London Olympics to try to win gold.
For himself, as would any person who experienced what he did at the 2008 Olympics, he also will try to find "some closure."
"To go through the last Olympics the way we had to do it, it was an atypical Olympic experience," McCutcheon says. "I'd be quite happy if this was real typical."
At the 2008 Games, as head coach of the U.S. men's volleyball team, McCutcheon weathered a collision of unspeakable tragedy and unforeseen triumph.
A day after the opening ceremony, his father-in-law was fatally stabbed in a random incident at a Beijing tourist site. McCutcheon missed the team's first three games to be with his wife, who witnessed the incident, and his mother-in-law, who was critically injured.
After his family returned to the USA, he returned to the U.S. bench in Beijing. The team made a surprising run to the gold medal, its first since 1988. He called it "the best of times and the worst of times."
Now the head coach of the U.S. women, McCutcheon, 42, understands his Beijing experience is part of his personal narrative. He will, however, resist attempts to weave it into his current team's storyline.
"While we all understand what happened and now I have a much greater understanding of the stage that it happened on to go back to that does a huge disservice to the amount of work that our staff and our team has put into building something really special," he says.
In London, McCutcheon, a New Zealand native, could be on the sidelines for another transcendant golden moment in U.S. volleyball.
The U.S. women, after qualifying for London by winning silver at last month's World Cup, are ranked No. 1 in the world and poised to win the Olympic title that has eluded them through history. Since volleyball was added to the Olympic program in 1964, the U.S. women have won two silver medals (in 1984 and 2008) and a bronze (1992).
The U.S. men have won three Olympic golds in that time a puzzling disparity given that the women can draw from a talent pool that currently includes 327 Division I women's volleyball programs. There are 23 Division I men's programs.
"It's not difficult for an outsider to say, 'Wow, with those kind of numbers, how is it that the women haven't won a gold medal at least once?'" says Karch Kiraly, who played on the winning men's teams at the 1984 and 1988 Olympics and who now is an assistant under McCutcheon.
Kiraly cites a variety of factors, including marked differences between college and international rules in the women's game. For the men, the rules are the same.
"The college game, as well-developed as it is in this country, is not particularly well-suited to developing great international talent," Kiraly says.
McCutcheon, whose wife, Elisabeth Bachman, played on the 2004 Olympic team, which finished fifth, says he and his staff are "not looking to come in and fix something, and certainly there's no disrespect for what's gone on before us."
They are trying to build a foundation of principles and techniques for a program that has been subject, over the years, to diverse coaching philosophies. McCutcheon runs many of the same systems and plays that he did with the men.
"He just makes sure that the team is thinking about team and thinking about how we can make the team better," says middle blocker Danielle Scott-Arruda, trying to make her fifth Olympic team. "It seems simple, but it's a philosophy that everyone has to buy into."
McCutcheon asked to coach the U.S. women after the 2008 Olympics.
"After having gone through that process with the men and accomplishing all of our goals, staying in this world and doing it all over again kind of re-inventing the same wheel didn't really hold the same appeal," he says.
Says Kiraly: "If it were me, it would have been too difficult to go to the Olympics, with the exact same program, on the men's side, and face all the exact same questions with a lot of the exact same faces around."
Since the 2008 Olympics, McCutcheon has become a father. His son, Andrew, is 18 months old. His wife is due to deliver their second child in April, which will keep her from traveling to London. His mother-in-law has recovered from her injuries and is "doing well," he says.
The Beijing Games were not his first experience with shocking loss. When McCutcheon was 14, his own father was diagnosed with cancer and died a week later.
"At that age, you come to a very swift understanding that every day is a gift," he says. "That sounds very clichι, but I guess a better way to say it is that you really have to have an appreciation for life, even when it's crummy. What happened in Beijing just validated all of that once again."
Ten months ago, McCutcheon got an opportunity that would have allowed him to turn off the path toward another Olympics and the inevitable media questions about what happened in Beijing.
The University of Minnesota hired him to succeed longtime coach Mike Hebert, who retired after the 2010 season.
Minnesota athletic director Joel Maturi, who called McCutcheon "the Mike Krzyzewski of volleyball" at the time of his hiring, gave him the option of delaying his start at Minnesota to stay with the U.S. team through the London Olympics.
"Cognitively, if you put it down on paper and kind of looked at the pros and cons, the smartest thing would have been to go (to Minnesota)," says McCutcheon, whose wife is a Minnesota native. "But as I thought about it and kind of got my head around all the things we had to try and manage, once I kind of got my heart involved, my heart was saying finish."
McCutcheon named one of Hebert's assistants, Laura Bush, as interim coach. Two of the members of his U.S. men's team coaching staff are her assistants.
McCutcheon talks with them infrequently.
"Laura is doing a great job and I don't need to but I would hate for her to feel like I was looking over her shoulder and trying to micromanage her from afar," he says.
The Gophers reached the Elite Eight at the NCAA tournament earlier this month. That success, coupled with the U.S. women's progress over the last three years (they won the prestigious FIVB World Grand Prix this year and last), has reinforced McCutcheon's decision.
He will stay in Anaheim, Calif., USA Volleyball's training base, for six more months. He will lead the U.S. women into the Olympics.
And there he will test his own fortitude as much as theirs.
"Part of the decision (to remain as the U.S. women's coach) was to resolve where I was at personally and whether I had anticipating what I think could come out of all of this the strength to go through it," he says.
"And, yeah, I'm OK."
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Posted - 12/26/2011 : 6:25:58 PM
