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Editor's Note: George Mason University men's volleyball head coach Jay Hosack has served as the head coach of the U21 United States men's national team since 2015. Earlier this summer, the team traveled to the Czech Republic to compete at the U21 World Championship. Coach Hosack recently sat down with GoMason.con to discuss the experience and what he will bring back to Mason this coming fall.

How did you first get involved with the national team back in 2006?
In 2005, after the Olympics in Greece, the national team moved its training headquarters from Colorado Springs to Anaheim, California, which is where it currently resides. I lived in Irvine at the time and I knew the new head coach, so I sent him an email expressing my interest in helping out. He gave me a call and said that he'd love to have me come in the gym. At the time, I was coaching two junior men and women's college teams, boys club, and getting my master's degree all at the same time. The timing worked out perfectly. After a few weeks in the gym, he said he would like to have me stick around longer and train the A-2 guys on the national team when the staff was gone on the road.  Next thing you know, I had been there for three to four years training for the 2008 Olympics in Beijing and we won the gold medal. That was how I got my start.

What was the gold medal run experience like?
The biggest thing I learned from that was what it takes to be successful at the very highest level. The National Team is obviously top caliber in the world but to win a gold medal means you are the best of the best. I saw what it took from the staff and players. I learned how to run effective drills in practices and manage different types of personalities. It is such a valuable experience to work in that environment. It just permeated everything else that I did from that point forward. When that happened, I saw a lot of success at the programs I was working with - so that is how my career took off.

What were your goals when you became the head coach of the junior team in 2015?
I have been the assistant coach for the two prior cycles, so the prior four years I was an assistant coach for that same program: U-21. It was a natural progression. The USA Volleyball powers that be said we would like you to take the next group and last year we won the gold medal at the NORCECA Zonal Championships which is how we qualified for the World Championships. We had not done that in the prior cycle. When you win that Zonal Championship, they rehire the staff for the following year and that's how I got to lead the team in the Czech Republic.

How do you select the team?
The staff and I in the first year pick and choose the best high school seniors and freshmen in college that we can find. It has to be in a certain age group. You have to pick between a two-year time frame window from when the players were born. Then we pick the best 20 or so players in the country and we invite them to a training center for six to 10 days.

Out of that, we trim it down to 12 and that becomes our travel roster for that tournament. That changes from year to year. So the first year, we had one group that we took and then the second year there was about a handful of new guys that had either improved or became available due to time constraints loosening up for them.

Once the team is picked what is the training process like before the World Championships?
We are probably the only team in the world that only spends a couple of weeks together maximum before we go to these tournaments. Everyone else, their teams are together for quite a long time preparing for this tournament. That is one of the reasons why it's tough for us to medal at that age level. What we are doing is playing as much as we can in practice, doing double day practices and just trying to accelerate as much as possible in terms of playing together rather than try to spend days together. That is what happens in the off time after we pick and before we leave for the tournament.

What is the experience like for the athletes?
I don't think anyone on the team had been to the Czech Republic before. It varies from year to year in terms of location for the tournaments. The only tournament before that they would have been able to do internationally is the U-19 tournament and that's just one tournament. The Czech Republic was a new experience.

The experience is similar to the Olympic Village in a sense that you are with the other teams that are in the tournament at your location in a hotel. Every team has its own floor, and they're all eating in the same dining room, all traveling on buses together and all training at the same gyms together. It's a neat way to see what other teams and programs do in terms of their setup and how they run their programs.

Our guys don't get as much from that than they do from playing, but they see what it means to be a part of the team. Playing wise, they are playing against guys that are professional already at the age group. The U-18, U-19 everyone is equal and the USA can be pretty successful and win some medals. In the U-21, it's a much different statement. The average 18/19-year old in Europe or around the world is already playing professionally, making money and playing with the best in their league and in their country.

For our guys, they are still in college, probably not playing with the best of the best, playing against the competition they have in their school gyms. It would be the equivalent of George Mason's baseball team taking on the New York Yankees. You're going to get a few points here and there, you're going to get some runs, you maybe get a game or two here and there but the reality is over time they are going to win out because they are that much stronger. There is nothing wrong with that. We know that job is dangerous when we take it. We have no disillusions that we should beating everyone in the world because we are the USA. But what it does it allows our athletes the ability to take what they saw back to their gyms and improve the quality of play within their own ranks and within their own schools.

We see that happening all the time. We have guys coming back saying, 'this is how this serve was done' and  'this is how this play was run' and they see how the international swing [which we always talk about as coaches] is really supposed to be executed. It's just a higher level of play that they can bring back to their own gyms.

How would you say the team performed with what your expectations were?
I think we should have finished 11^th or 12^th. I'm not sure that 14^th was a respectable enough finish for me but regardless of that, the teams that we lost to are not bad teams at all. I just didn't think we executed as well as we could have. Finishing 14^th out of the top 16 teams in the world - to be considered in that group that's an accomplishment in itself. There are a lot of teams that didn't have a team there and a lot of countries with top level men's national teams in which that their junior team didn't get to make that tournament. So we feel good about that. For our guys, it's about learning how to focus and regroup after a loss and being able to bring it in the next match. That's a learning curve that sometimes American youth don't really have such a quick turnaround with.

What lessons from this experience will you bring back to Mason and the sidelines this year?
As coaches we bring back something different. One of the things that we all do is we notice different drills, different ways to warm up, different ways to play the game in order to prepare. I'm bringing back a lot of video and I want to show the guys here the relentless defense the international teams play. We are a pretty scrappy defensive team here at Mason but we're nowhere near the level of dedication to defense that some of those places are. That is something we can definitely improve upon without having to be bigger, stronger, and faster. It is just being more aware and having more determination.

I think learning how to swing the international swing is something that we can do. It's going to take a little time practicing but I think that is something we can improve upon. I think the serve and pass game at the international level at our age group is where the real rubber meets the road. If we can mimic some of the things that we see – t he intensity and the dedication to the craft - I think that can translate into some points for us and put some teams in situations they don't want to be in.

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