Cobb Cherokee In The Game High School Sports Magazine

With the coaching profession comes a high turnover rate. When educators leave college and get their first job, they know from the outset that their tenures could be short. Fans are fickle, and sometimes assistants are casualties if a head coach is asked to leave a school. For a coach to stay at one school for an extended period of time is rare these days. Yet that is exactly what Karen Arndt, The Walker School’s head varsity volleyball coach, has done.

It might not be entirely accurate to say that Arndt coached at one school for 20 of her 21 years in education. She did, however, spend seven years coaching for a school at which she remained for two decades. Arndt was an Air Force kid. She went to high school in Colorado but lived all over the place. She started playing volleyball in high school, and she also joined the basketball and soccer teams. Her soccer and volleyball teams won region titles during her high school years.

Arndt earned a volleyball scholarship to Idaho State, where she played for two years. She always knew she wanted to be a teacher, and she stopped playing volleyball after her sophomore year to focus on her education. Coaching was not something she was considering back then.

In 1990, she and her husband, Paul, moved to Georgia. Paul Arndt works with the U.S. Forestry Service and found a job in Georgia. When the couple moved to the area, Arndt took a job teaching with Faith Lutheran School, also in Marietta. Thirteen years after joining the Faith Lutheran staff, the school decided to begin an athletic program. Faith Lutheran is a small school that offers classes only to the eighth-grade level. One of the sports Faith Lutheran wanted to add was volleyball. The administration asked Arndt if she was interested in taking the job coaching the fledgling program. Her daughter, Rebecca, was in the fifth grade and could play on the team. She said yes and coached at Faith Lutheran for seven years.

When her daughter started playing volleyball for the A5 club, Arndt began coaching at the club level. Through her work with the club team, she became acquainted with many of the high school coaches in the area. When the head varsity coaching position at the Walker School came available after last year, she was encouraged to apply for the job. “I was uncertain about moving jobs after 20 years, but I decided to put in a resume,” she recalls. The Walker School administration liked what it saw and hired Arndt.

Once Arndt had the job, she felt she had to make some changes in her coaching style. “I wanted to coach in a way that was appropriate for the varsity level,” she says. As it turned out, Arndt found that she ran many of the same drills and skill workouts with the club team that the varsity team did. The biggest difference was the speed of the game. “We really did do some of the same things. We just had to pick up the pace,” she states.

Because of her work with the A5 club, Arndt also already knew many of the players on The Walker School’s team. She was familiar with their skill levels and knew they were talented enough to get into the postseason. “I knew they could make the playoffs,” says Arndt, “I just had to sell that to them.” That was the biggest thing - convincing the girls they could be one of the elite teams in the state. Arndt inherited a solid volleyball program. The middle school program generated some good players, and several Wolverines played club ball. TWS volleyball program was a playoff-caliber team with a strong legacy.

Yet the job was not without its challenges. Arndt and the players - particularly the seniors - had to get used to each other. There is also a pretty big gap in skill level among players on the team. Some play club ball, and those players tend to be more skilled because of the extra time spent on the court. Bridging that gap and getting the players to work together as a team wasn’t the easiest thing to do.

Keeping all of the players on the same page throughout the season was difficult at times. “We did a lot of high intensity drills to foster communication. We had to play strong on defense and communicate with each other,” says Arndt.

Little by little, the players learned that if they worked hard, were dedicated and filled their roles on the court, they would be successful. The little successes led to small victories. Those smaller wins led to bigger wins. “Before long, they were winning big games and believing they could be successful,” says Arndt.

Arndt’s philosophy is built upon hard work and mastering the fundamentals. She believes in working day after day on the fundamentals, always striving to perfect every aspect of the game. Paying attention to the little things - repeating the same motions, situations and drills day in and day out until they are second nature - and hard work form the foundation of her approach to coaching. It’s not a very elaborate or glamorous style but it is very effective. “Those principles apply to more than just volleyball. They are good life lessons as well,” she says.

So just how successful was The Walker School this year under a first-year varsity coach? The Wolverines went 36-7, won their first area championship in several years, advanced all the way to the Sweet Sixteen and finished the season ranked fourth in the state.

Arndt would not have achieved this kind of success without the support of her family. When she decided to apply for the Wolverines head coaching job, she called in her family and consulted them before committing to anything. “They backed me completely,” she says.

Arndt’s biggest concern was her daughter, a senior at Lassiter. Arndt wanted to watch Rebecca play her senior year, and she was concerned that coaching at the varsity level might keep her away from Rebecca’s games. “Rebecca told me to do it. And I’ve been able to get to most of Lassiter’s games,” says Arndt. Paul, her husband of 28 years, was on board immediately, as was her son, Erik, now a senior at Georgia Tech.

That her family was so supportive turned out to be a very good thing - one year with the high school girls is all it took to grab Arndt and not let her go. “I love coaching at the varsity level. You get to do the same things you do at the middle school level, but you add strategizing to the mix. You get to scout other teams, work up game plans and then work with the team to execute those game plans. It’s a lot of fun,” she says.

That’s good news for The Walker School, but bad news for the rest of the teams on the Wolverines schedule. ITG