‘Too excited to be tired.’ New USC volleyball coach details first days on the job
The last two weeks have been moving at breakneck speed for Sarah Rumely Noble.
She’s been all over the place since she was announced as South Carolina’s new head women’s volleyball coach on March 31.
“I’ve officially been on campus for two weeks today,” Rumely Noble said Tuesday. “I got in around this time two weeks ago, on a Tuesday and just hit the ground running.”
Rumely Noble met with her now former team at App State at 3 p.m. that day to inform them she intended to take the job at South Carolina. Leaving the site of her first head coaching gig wasn’t easy, and that team meeting was “emotional” and “really hard,” she said.
The next two hours were filled with phone calls, texts and FaceTimes with recruits and eventually calls with the players on South Carolina’s roster.
She packed up a few of her things and headed to Columbia the next day. On Wednesday — 48 hours later — she held a meeting with the Gamecocks and immediately jumped into practice. Rumely Noble made her first two assistant coach hires the next day, officially announcing that she was bringing Connor Zimmick and Chanelle Hargreaves with her to Columbia from App State.
Rumely Noble had a brief moment of peace (if you can call it that) to end the week when she was joined by her husband in Columbia where the two started trying to get life organized, she joked.
Things slowed but a bit last week, but rest assured Rumely Noble stayed busy.
She had a phone call with every high school recruit who is signed or committed to South Carolina, was out on the recruiting trail Thursday and Friday before taking the team to Winthrop for a game on Saturday and hitting the recruiting trail, yet again, on Sunday.
The recruiting hasn’t stopped — the Gamecocks had three potential recruits in town Tuesday night — and she also has two more positions on her staff to fill. Still, Rumely Noble is taking it all in stride.
“It’s a whirlwind,” Rumely Noble said. “If you’re not high capacity, I’m not sure that this is probably the job for you. Just trying to be excited every step of the way. I’m too excited to be tired.”
Building a team, early expectations
The first few weeks of any job, especially a college sports head coach, can be hectic. Still, Rumely Noble is a bit behind the eight ball due to the time of her hiring.
College volleyball hires are typically made in December and January after the season ends, she said. The South Carolina job didn’t come open until early March due to a domino effect of sorts in the volleyball coaching world.
Legendary Florida coach Mary Wise retired in early February after 34 years with the program. She was then replaced by Marquette coach Ryan Theis a few weeks later. As a result, Marquette hired Tom Mendoza away from South Carolina on March 2 and left the position open in Columbia that Rumely Noble eventually filled later that month.
Rumely Noble said she doesn’t want to rush anything when it comes to molding South Carolina volleyball into her vision, but acknowledged there is an added sense of urgency due to the timing of everything. She praised her team for making the transition easier.
“They’ve been great. The team has been phenomenal,” Rumely Noble said. “That has been a huge weight off of my shoulders, of how amazing they’ve been, how quickly they’ve bought in. I’m very, very thankful for that. That’s allowed us to wrap our head around the recruiting front, the roster development side of things.”
South Carolina volleyball has seen varying levels of success in the last 25 years. The Gamecocks made three straight NCAA Tournament appearances from 2000 to 2002 but didn’t make it again until Mendoza’s first year in 2018. South Carolina made the NCAA Tournament four times in Mendoza’s seven years at the helm, including a trip last year, but never made it past the second round.
Rumely Noble said she’s establishing “two buckets” in her program; one driven by culture and the other driven by the execution in actual games. Creating a strong foundation for the future is what she thinks success looks like in her first year on the job, but that doesn’t mean she doesn’t also want to win right away.
“I think it’s making sure that we’re creating a model that’s sustainable over time,” Rumely Noble said. “I want to tailor the expectations to understand we’re gonna have so many new faces as we’re building our roster. Obviously, I’m competitive and I want to win, but can we fight our way into the NCAA tournament this upcoming year? That would be amazing for us. ... But I really want to set the program up for success by building a strong foundation from the jump.”
Rumely Noble was a four-time All-SEC honoree at Kentucky during her playing days and was inducted into the Kentucky Athletics Hall of Fame in 2017.
She got into coaching in 2011 and logged stints as an assistant at North Texas (2011-2013), Wake Forest (2013-2015), Arkansas (2015-2017) and LSU (2017-2021) before becoming the head coach at App State. She won 18 games in her first year at App State after the Mountaineers had tallied just eight in the two previous seasons. Rumely Noble finished with a 50-35 record at App State.
No South Carolina volleyball team has made it past the second round of the NCAA Tournament in all of the program’s history, but Rumely Noble believes she has what it takes to push the Gamecocks further into the postseason.
“I want to try to re-create the experience that I had so that I can have athletes that walk out of any program that I’m in say, ‘Wow, that was an amazing ride. That was an amazing opportunity.’,” Rumely Noble said. “So that’s kind of been my mission in coaching, is, can I build people and can we win some volleyball games at the same time?
“...Because of my experiences at Kentucky and as a player, I felt like I was able to step in and know how to (flip the script at App State), which then that created me to have the opportunity to get back into the SEC and take this job.”
This story was originally published April 17, 2025 at 7:00 AM.
