Morrison feels the excitement building ahead of third season at A&M

With Logan Lednicky named to the USA Volleyball National Team Long-List Roster, Texas A&M head volleyball coach Jamie Morrison joined Thursday's edition of TexAgs Live to talk roster additions as the Maroon & White prepare for the 2025 campaign.

Key notes from Jamie Morrison interview

• I think our team is in a really good spot. We worked really hard over the spring to upgrade our game, and it showed at the end.
   
• I think Trisha Ford is doing an amazing job with softball. I’ve got to keep up. I’m inspired, and I’m fired up for them. I’ve told my team that we have a chance of winning the national championship, but we have to go about it in the right way to get there.
   
• They have the preseason rankings, and everyone has us in the top 10. It’s eye-opening and crazy to me, but it’s also not surprising. My staff has worked hard, and our players have worked hard. We’re seeing the fruits of that. I think it was a very similar situation to softball last year, with the Sweet 16 knocking on the door. All of a sudden, we have the chance to come back with a nucleus that is the same as last season.
   
• We played a really tough spring schedule. We played ourselves, which is really tough as well now. I think all six of those teams have been in the top 25. We played SMU twice, once early, and we ended up losing that. If we lose, we take that as a learning opportunity. We played them again in Week 5 and looked at the things we had to get better at. Then we came out and took care of them, a very good volleyball team, maybe top 15. We swept them. I’m sure they’ll come back at us in the fall, but it's another great opportunity for us. I love this team because we didn't let that loss crush us, but we learned and got better. We have to continue to do that.
   
• It’s going to be easier now. The first three years are hard. The first year felt like this soft, moldable clay. Then it started to get hard. You get to year three, and it forms into what you think it should look like as a coach. All of a sudden, you get behavior that starts to cycle year after year.
   
• I think it’s easier now because people start to fit into the norm of the team. The people who have been here from the beginning put in the grunt work to change the behavior. I had coffee with one of them. She said it's awesome to see the fruits of this labor. A player who graduated in year one said she wanted to be a part of it, even though she wouldn’t be here for the entirety of it. The people in this senior class will get to see it. We can't say that we already made it. We’re not a team that can win a national championship right now, but we're getting there.
   
• Logan Lednicky and I sat down, and I said one of the best marketing things I can do for our team is to put her on the national team. I want this to be a place where we build people who want to go play nationally. As soon as I got the call from the national team coach, it was a moment of pride for her and her work as well as for me and my staff. We were able to do that in a matter of years.
   
• Another player who hasn't been asked yet will be on a U23 team. I think we’re getting to the point of having that momentum in both behavior and volleyball. Our freshmen came in here and immediately did that, and I think that’s a product of the environment.
   
• The way volleyball works, there's a professional season that just ended. We have three professional leagues in the US right now: PVF, League 1 and Athletes Unlimited. Then we kick into the national season. The best of the best. Lednicky is on a list of 30, maybe 25 players eligible to play in the Volleyball Nations League. The equivalent of the NBA for volleyball. They’re going to take six teams and travel to Serbia. The best way to follow is through social media. Follow along with Volleyball World, which has a ton of matches.
   
• When I came to A&M, I think it rubbed people the wrong way because of my passion. I think people have realized that I love the sport, I want it to grow, and I want to push the presentation of it. I don’t take no for an answer very well when I'm passionate. I think people in the volleyball world already knew that, and I think there’s a lot of respect for this program right now.
   
• People have seen this rise happening, and there's a lot of outside excitement about what we're going to do next. That's awesome, but it’s also my biggest fear. All of a sudden, you have expectations. We need to learn how to take those the right way and live up to them. Every single week, somebody is coming for us. It means people are playing harder against us every week. I think the outside world sees the program very differently now.
   
• I’ve always said that we've had losses I was happy about and wins I was very upset with. For me, success is the way you go about business when you step out on the floor. I think the execution of things you think are really important as a head coach is important to define. If we go out and sleepwalk through a match and win but don’t compete and put on a show for the 12th Man, I'm going to be a little frustrated. For me, that's success. When you get into the tournament, can you stay true to that as a team for the longest, more than your opponent? In those moments, who’s going to stay closest to who they are as a team, who they are as a coach? Those are the teams that are going to go the furthest.
   
• We brought in Djurdja Stanojevic. It is late. There are always recruiting rules. We had a middle blocker whose track and field times were getting close to Olympic levels. All of a sudden, this starts to happen, and I know what the Olympics are like. I’m fully supportive, but we’re in this waiting game. I'd played against Stanojevic before, and we always look for people to build around. I’m really excited to bring her in for the summer and especially in the fall, as a volleyball player and a human being.
   
• We are probably the oldest team in the country, which has a lot of positives and experience. My goal is to try and get athletes to the point where we are equals, where their knowledge gets close to mine. That takes time. We have that goal, and five people are coming in the freshman class. I’m most excited that not only will we be good in the short run, but we are set up to be good for a very long time. Something I talk about is sustained success, and I think we’ve done a pretty good job at that.
   
• I tell our staff every day, when you have turbulent times, it's a chance to get ahead. How do we make the most of this situation? All of a sudden, money is involved. How do we maintain the development of volleyball players and humans? It’s on my mind constantly, and it’s something we check on every day. We try to do it the right way.
   
• When I took this job, I had a lot of people scratching their heads. There were a couple of other jobs open, but I knew I wanted to be in a place with resources and a fan base. With that comes the financial support around it, where you can build around the student-athletes. It's going to be a little flowing through the school, but a lot of what the community can do to support and use the athletes in a win-win situation. They are a marketable face for a business, and my athletes can learn how to run their own business. I think this is where we have a superpower. When those things mesh together is where the superpower happens.
   
• On June 7, I will select a roster. At the end of June, we will compete in Canada. And then on June 15, we can talk to 2027 recruits. The class is really talented, and a lot of recruits are interested in this program. We’re really excited about getting going.