Kiraly and Speraw to lead USA to Paris 2024

The United States women’s and men’s national teams will be guided by familiar faces in the years leading to the Paris 2024 Olympics after the country’s national federation confirmed that Karch Kiraly and John Speraw will remain as their head coaches for at least another three years. For both, it will be a third consecutive Olympic campaign at the helm.

Kiraly’s tenure with the women’s team has been extremely successful. Promoted from his assistant role in September 2012, the 61-year-old led the Americans to victory at the Tokyo Games earlier this year and became the first person to win Olympic gold medals as a volleyball player (Los Angeles 1984 and Seoul 1988), a beach volleyball player (Atlanta 1996) and a coach (Tokyo 2020).

During his first nine years in charge, the United States also won the 2014 FIVB Volleyball Women's World Championship and three editions of the FIVB Volleyball Nations League (2018, 2019 and 2021), besides taking silver at the FIVB Volleyball Women's World Cup (2019) and the FIVB Volleyball World Grand Champions Cup (2013).

“Making history in Tokyo was immensely rewarding,” said Kiraly. “It gets me hungry for more, as it does for everyone in our programme. I love this job, because I get the daily privilege of working with people I love; people of high character who are committed to learning and to pursuing epic team performance. I am honoured and thrilled to get to do it for another three years.”

Appointed as the men’s head coach in 2013, Speraw helped his team lift trophies at the 2015 Men's World Cup and the 2014 FIVB Volleyball World League. He also won VNL silver (2019) and bronze (2018), and bronze at the 2018 Men's World Championship.

Speraw was also part of the coaching staff that helped the United States win gold at the 2008 Beijing Olympics ,working under Hugh McCutcheon. Speraw then led USA to bronze in Rio five years ago.

“It is a tremendous honour to represent Team USA,” the 50-year-old Speraw said. “I love working with these athletes. It’s a unique environment. On Team USA, you can develop really good relationships with guys because they can be in the gym a long time. Finally, we didn’t do very well in Tokyo, so I want to make it right. I want to get back out there and give it another shot.”

Both coaches should have a busy 2022 season as their teams will compete at the VNL and then at the World Championships – with the men set to play in Russia and the women in the Netherlands and Poland.