Meredith Schamun is giving Penn volleyball ‘some love and attention’ as she continues rebuilding its culture

The situation for Penn volleyball was especially dire in 2020.

By the time former coach Iain Braddak resigned, he already had been accused of myriad offenses, including instructing an assistant coach to chuck a ball in the face of a struggling player. In 2019, the end of his team’s season was canceled after offensive signs were found in the players’ locker room.

“They [the players] didn’t feel like they had any sort of relationship with our coach,” said senior outside hitter Emerson Flornes. “I think the team always just really disliked the coach. ... There was just really no relationship between coach and player, and it just felt like the team was kind of isolated on their own island.”

In Braddak’s place stepped Meredith Schamun, a former Villanova assistant coach who had played at Rice. Schamun was Penn’s fourth coach in five years.

The culture she inherited was far from perfect, but Schamun assessed the problems and what she felt was missing.

“I think it was in a place that just needed some love and attention,” Schamun said. “I think a lot of the players had lost a little bit of their passion for the game and their love for the game.”

Adding onto the challenges was the timing of her hire. Schamun accepted the job virtually in March 2020, and that year’s season was canceled because of COVID-19. As a team, Penn didn’t touch a volleyball until February 2021.

Unable to enact her plans immediately, Schamun focused instead on building trust with her players over Zoom. The team watched volleyball and read the book Chop Wood, Carry Water together, among other team-building exercises.

“I think our big goal at first, especially because we couldn’t play because of COVID, was just to build a relationship,” Schamun said. “To get them to know us, to get them to trust us a little bit, to get them to understand what our coaching philosophy is and all that.”

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Part of that philosophy involves ensuring that her players are as comfortable on the court as they are off of it, which was a welcome change for the team members.

“She does recognize that we are people outside of the program, so she’s really good about making sure that we’re in a good space mentally and that we know that we have resources available to us, and [she] really tries to foster a good community,” Flornes said.

On the court, though, Penn has struggled. During Schamun’s three seasons with the program, the Quakers have gone 13-54, and Penn had its worst record in team history last season at 2-22. This year’s squad is 3-17 with four regular-season matches remaining, but patience is a virtue, and Penn has placed its trust in Schamun.

Last month, the school announced that it had given her a multiyear contract, thanks to the “team culture and recent recruiting classes.”

“She’s really trying to build something, and she’s not hasty in trying to get to the goal and trying to build a house on a broken foundation,” Flornes said. “She’s really taken her time to develop the culture that she has in mind for the program that she wants to build, and I think that she’s done that in a very meticulous and well-thought-out way.”

As for the wins and losses, Schamun emphasized that winning has to become a habit for her team. She also envisions that those recent recruiting classes will start to pay dividends, and, perhaps most important, her group is driven to start succeeding.

“The team is hungry for wins, and as we continue to recruit well, we get players that are able to produce in those games, and then wins happen, and once it starts, it’s cyclical,” she said. “And then from there, we’ll be hopefully making a run every year in the tournament.”

Regardless of record, Penn volleyball has become a drastically different program under Schamun’s watch, all stemming from the culture that she’s built, and will oversee for the foreseeable future.

“I think culture will take you a lot farther than talent does,” Schamun said. “So I think now that we have culture built, as we get those talented pieces, it’s just going to continue to move us in the right direction.”

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