If you're keeping track on your scorecard, there are now two current high school volleyball coaches from the Price family of Bellevue—former Albertson College volleyball All-Star Kristyn Price and her older brother B.J. Price.
The fact that B.J. Price was named the new varsity girls' volleyball coach at 5A Twin Falls High School June 7 is a bigger surprise than the fact that Kristyn Price was an assistant volleyball coach for The Community School last fall.
A star basketball player in high school, B.J. Price, 28, has accepted his first head coaching job in volleyball at Twin Falls High School. Price, a 2006 Boise State University graduate in kinesiology, will teach biology there this coming fall.
He is taking over a program coached by Niki Walker last fall that went 9-13 in the tough Region 4/5/6 conference and beat only Madison in league play. The 5A big city league produced two of the top three teams in the 2006 State 5A tournament at Burley—runner-up Skyline of Idaho Falls and third-place Idaho Falls.
It's a challenge, Price said.
"My biggest asset is how excited I am and my enthusiasm," said Price, who met with some of his Twin Falls players for the first time Monday in a summer open gym session. "Twin Falls is kind of behind in club volleyball so I want to increase our interest in club."
Price has coached club volleyball, an off-season travel competition program, for the past four years. He also re-started the Boise State University men's club volleyball program in 2002-03 while a student there. Price played a little junior college volleyball at Lewis-Clark State College as well.
He first got involved in Idaho prep volleyball in 2006.
B.J. was at the State 4A volleyball tournament in Kimberly last fall as assistant coach of the Century Diamondbacks coached by Naomi Richards Ostergar, daughter of longtime Filer volleyball coach Ed Richards. Century had a great run at state, playing eventual champion Sandpoint tough in its opener and then losing in five tough games to Preston.
Price, who owns and operates Alpine Sprinklers in Twin Falls where he has purchased a house, first applied for the Twin Falls teaching and coaching job in February 2007.
Both Price siblings were strongly influenced by former Wood River High and current Community School volleyball coach Reamy Goodwin. But Kristen was the star player.
Kristyn sparked Wood River varsity teams under coach Goodwin to an amazing 127-29 record and four district tournament titles from 1995-98. The outside hitter set kills records as a four-year starter at Albertson College in Caldwell and was Cascade Conference "Player of the Year," in 2002.
A basketball star at Wood River during his three-year varsity career from 1994-97, B.J. came to volleyball in a more roundabout fashion.
But he acknowledged that watching Goodwin inter-act with his student athletes was a big factor in his ultimate career choice of teaching/coaching.
"My interest in volleyball started with watching my sister play for Reamy," said Price. "But I've always been interested in athletics and coaching, since I coached little kids in basketball during high school."
Price, who scored 363 varsity points in four years for Wood River, was coach Darren Clemenhagen's second-leading scorer at 9.6 ppg for an 11-12 Wolverine team that reached the Fourth District championship game against Jerome in 1996, when Price was a junior.
His average remained 9.3 ppg during the first part of his subsequent senior year, but Price and several teammates left the Wood River basketball team during the brief and turbulent head coaching reign of Dave Zamora in 1997.
Now, Price acknowledges that watching the Zamora situation that embroiled the Wood River athletic department encouraged him to pursue coaching—if only to make sure high school kids were properly coached and not subjected to the same treatment.
