First-year Camosun Chargers women’s volleyball assistant coach and former standout player for the Thompson Rivers University (TRU) volleyball team Katie Ludvig is participating in the Canadian Collegiate Athletic Association’s Female Apprentice Coach Program (FACP), which fosters the development of female coaches in varsity sports.
Ludvig has a myriad of academic and athletic accomplishments—five highly successful seasons at TRU, being named captain and Leader of the Year in her fifth year, and receiving All-Canadian honours each year she was at TRU. And after playing one year of professional volleyball in Czechia, she moved to Victoria to start her coaching career with the Chargers.
“I knew I wanted to get back involved with volleyball but in the coaching sense,” says Ludvig.
Once in the position, Hall informed her about FACP and helped her apply. Since then, she has been developing her coaching skills under the wing of her program mentor Hall.
“The goal is to kind of look at him, shadow him, and see how he runs the team, which has been great. I’ve learned a lot from him,” says Ludvig. “We meet with the program, the faculty and the people who run the program every month. So that group is a bunch of girls across Canada who are doing the exact same thing as me.”
While learning from Hall, Ludvig has also been able to talk to other FACP participants about her experience in the field.
“We get to connect monthly and talk about our experience coaching and give each other some help, advice, and feedback and kind of open up the floor to what our experience has been,” she says. “We have a workbook that we go through, kind of helping us to develop our own mentorship and leadership style… It’s nice to chat with people who are doing the same thing as you and who have been there before.”
While FACP is a great resource and learning experience for her, Ludvig says that she has learned a lot just from being under the presence of Hall and how he treats his team.
“He’s definitely taught me to be very open-minded. [The] coolest thing I admire about him is he’s so open-minded with his team, and it makes me want to [have] a similar coaching style. He opens the floor to his players every practice for their feedback, their opinions, and their feelings. It feels like everyone’s kind of contributing to the team and it’s not just one person,” says Ludvig. “And he’s also very patient. I think he explains things in a way that everyone can really understand and kind of grasp.”
Ludvig says that this year’s Chargers team is talented and has potential for future success.
“It’s been super cool watching them compete. And I think the most exciting part is how much better everyone [is getting] but especially the younger players [have] gotten since the start of the year,” says Ludvig. “They had a pretty strong first semester, but I think the best is yet to come in the second semester… Practices are pretty intense and I think that speaks to the way they show up in games because they’re definitely pushing themselves.”