About Ryan Walker

College: Bigger Courts, Harder Lessons

The scholarship offer came from a program that had made the NCAA tournament three times in the previous decade. Playing there meant competing against athletes who were bigger, faster, and often more experienced than anyone I’d faced in Minnesota.

The adjustment was brutal.

In high school, I could get away with relying on timing and court sense. In college, everyone had court sense. Everyone had timing. The difference between playing and sitting came down to whether you’d put in the extra hours—the early morning lifts, the film sessions where coaches broke down your footwork frame by frame, the serving practice after everyone else had gone home.

I learned what real volleyball training looked like. I learned that my approach jump was two inches shorter than it needed to be and spent an entire offseason doing plyometric work until I fixed it. And, that the connection between me and my setter—that split-second read of where the ball would be before she even released it—was something you could train if you put in the reps. Nutrition mattered, that sleep mattered, that recovery wasn’t optional.

The National Collegiate Volleyball Championship was the biggest stage I’d ever played on. We made the quarterfinals my junior year, losing to a team that went on to win the whole thing. I still watch film from that match sometimes. We were outclassed, but we didn’t quit. That’s the thing I’m proudest of.

Senior year, we won the Intercollegiate Volleyball Tournament—an annual competition we’d finished runner-up in the year before. Walking off that court with the trophy felt like redemption. Like proof that the work actually mattered.

That summer, our team traveled to Europe for an international tournament. Playing against athletes from different countries, experiencing different systems and styles—rotational defenses I’d never seen, quick sets run at tempos that made our middles look slow—showed me how big volleyball really was. This wasn’t just a Midwestern sport. This was global.

I came back convinced I could make a run at playing professionally.

The Part of the Story Nobody Wants to Tell

Three months after graduation, I tore my rotator cuff.

Not during a match. Not during some dramatic moment I could point to and say “that’s where it ended.” I was in a gym doing a hitting drill I’d done a thousand times before, and something just… gave out.

The surgery went fine. The recovery didn’t.

Six months of physical therapy later, my shoulder was technically healed. But I’d lost velocity on my swing. My approach felt hesitant. The timing that had always come naturally was now something I had to think about—and when you’re thinking about your mechanics in the middle of a rally, you’ve already lost.

I tried out for two semi-pro teams. I didn’t make either roster.

That’s a hard thing to admit, even now. I’d built my identity around being a volleyball player, and suddenly I wasn’t one anymore. Or at least, not the kind I’d always imagined I’d be.

For about a year, I didn’t touch a ball. I threw myself into building a career in IT—networking, system architecture, the kind of work that had nothing to do with courts or nets or the sound of a clean kill. I was good at it. I got promoted. I told myself I’d moved on.

But you don’t spend twenty years loving something and then just stop.

Here’s the thing about that injury: it made me obsessive in a way I wasn’t before. Now when I review shoes, I’m looking at ankle support and cushioning systems because I know what it feels like when your body fails you. When I break down approach mechanics, I’m thinking about joint stress and sustainable form because I’ve lived through what happens when you ignore those details. The injury didn’t end my volleyball career—it just changed what that career looks like.

The IT Mind Meets the Volleyball Mind

As an IT network professional, I spend my days looking for single points of failure in complex systems. A misconfigured router. A bottleneck in data flow. The one weak link that brings everything down.

I realized I was doing the same thing on the volleyball court.

I don’t just look at a shoe; I look at its structural architecture—where the flex points are, how the midsole absorbs impact, whether the traction pattern actually grips on dusty courts or just looks good in photos. I don’t just watch a serve; I analyze the biomechanical sequence—the toss placement, the shoulder rotation, the contact point, and which element is most likely to break down under pressure.

This is why my reviews read differently than most volleyball content. I’m not giving you feelings. I’m giving you diagnostics. And when something doesn’t work, I’ll tell you exactly why—because that’s how I’d troubleshoot a network failure, and that’s how I approach everything on the court.

Finding a Different Way to Stay in the Game

I started coaching almost by accident.

A friend’s daughter was playing club volleyball, and the team needed an assistant coach. I said yes without really thinking about it, and within two weeks I remembered why I’d fallen in love with this sport in the first place.

It wasn’t the playing. It was the figuring it out. Watching a kid struggle with her approach and realizing she was planting her penultimate step too early. Seeing a setter’s eyes go to the wrong place before every set and working with him until he learned to look off the blockers. Taking a team that couldn’t pass a float serve in September and watching them run a 5-1 offense with first-tempo middles by February.

Over the next several years, I coached over 450 players across club, high school, and rec leagues. Some of them went on to play in college. Most of them just wanted to get better at a sport they enjoyed. Both outcomes mattered to me equally.

But coaching also showed me a problem.

The resources available to players—especially players who couldn’t afford expensive camps or private lessons—were terrible. The internet was full of volleyball content that was either too basic to be useful or so loaded with jargon that it intimidated beginners. Gear reviews were written by people who’d never played competitively. Position guides were copied from the same outdated sources everyone else was using.

I kept thinking: Someone should fix this.

Eventually, I decided to be that someone.