If — or more likely when — Colorado State University volleyball coach Tom Hilbert has to find space for a new trophy on his filing cabinet, he will. But it’s a tight fit. So tight, in fact, that he’s got an auxiliary space for some of the hardware.
The leader in collegiate wins in any sport and university in Colorado has led CSU to 17 regular season conference titles, five conference tourney championships and the NCAA tournament’s Sweet 16 six times. He’s been a conference coach of the year at least a dozen times.
Asked how his program does it, Hilbert smiled and said: “By not thinking about it.”
CSU Athletics Director Joe Parker said when introducing Hilbert to alumni groups, he calls the volleyball coach the gold standard to which all Rams athletics programs are measured.
“And he is,” Parker said. “He’s touched on three decades here at CSU and has built a consistent championship culture that every year just kind of spins a flywheel and puts us in a position to be competitive in our peer group in the Mountain West.”
Starting his 26th season in Fort Collins, Hilbert is 618-153 at CSU and 792-225 overall, so on-court coaching has to be a big part of it. But Hilbert points to the lifeblood of any long-standing successful athletics program: recruiting.
“When I see players, I have to be able to envision and say that person can help us win a Mountain West championship,” Hilbert said. “You don’t settle for somebody who you don’t see doing that simply because you want to be done recruiting.
“And that’s the biggest lesson I want to project to my assistants. It’s like you don’t just settle to be done. Every player that you recruit, you have to have this vision.”
Turning talent into production
Two players who fit the narrative of having the talent to play big-time volleyball are juniors Naeemah “Nemo” Weathers and Ruby Kayser, both expected to be important rotation players.
Assistant Coach Adrianna Blackman, who was a third-team All-American at CSU in 2015, said the middle blocker Weathers started volleyball later in life. “She’s not all the way to her potential yet,” Blackman said. “But she’s such an athlete.”
Blackman said Kayser, a defensive specialist who left some skin on the new Moby Arena floor during an early season practice, “is a grinder in everything she does” who will “do anything to stop that ball from hitting the floor.”
“I think Nemo and I are two good examples of coming in kind of raw but athletic and have grown so much,” Kayser said. “We are so much better from our freshman year to now.”
And when new players get to Fort Collins, get coached up and play in front of big crowds, winning becomes and remains contagious.
“Our home match environment, we believe, is among the top in the United States,” Hilbert said. “And so it’s so important for us to communicate that and show that to young people coming in for recruiting. It’s big.”
Gaining one fan at a time
That advantage is earned.
“You know that we have a ton of fans,” Blackman said. “You don’t realize what goes behind it and all the work and relationships that are built and time that’s spent along the way to create that fanbase.”
Weathers, who said she was “mesmerized” while attending a CSU home match while being recruited, said volleyball players are “always somewhere doing something, handing out flyers, engaging fans, talking to kids or teaching at clinics.”
The team’s Twitter account is active with player introduction videos and reminders about the season’s key dates.
Kayser said she saw videos of the Moby madness and then, after she committed, saw a home match that iced a Mountain West championship. At Moby, Hilbert’s teams have won more than 88% of the time.
In celebrating the 50th anniversary of Title IX, Hilbert relishes how much women’s college athletics have grown.
“I feel like in a sport like volleyball, the only way you get real support is to make friends one fan at a time,” Hilbert said. “You get them to know you, you get them to know your players, and then they come to games and they start to gain a real appreciation for it.”
Building a culture
“My time here as a student-athlete here at CSU is a huge part of who I am as a person, but also why I coach,” Blackman said. “Tom does an amazing job of creating a culture that supports the student-athlete, so much more than what happens on the court.
“I mean, we do some remarkable things on the court, but he really manages the overall experience.”
Hilbert sold her on the program as a player and when he asked her to come back to coach in 2019.
“To be able to coach the players that are walking in the same footsteps that I did as a student-athlete, there’s really nothing quite like it,” Blackman said, adding that Hilbert often asks about her young twins — whom she calls “Blackberries” — and that he has that kind of relationship with many people.
“It’s not just for the wins. It’s for the people,” Blackman added. “During our alumni weekend, there’s 60 to 70 alums from all generations.”
A championship mindset
After a stretch of making the NCAA tournament at CSU every year since his first in 1997, the many banners hanging in Moby Arena show that the Rams haven’t been there since the pandemic altered everything.
There’s program pressure, but also confidence. “I think it’s just the expectations that we place on ourselves,” Blackman said. “You’re always getting pushed.”
Last fall, CSU and Utah State each had 14-4 regular season records. The Rams made a lower-tier postseason tournament and finished 18-9 overall. After that, Hilbert says a supporter “consoled” him.
“We won the conference!” Hilbert said in reflection of that conversation. So if that’s a down year for his program, the volleyball program is indeed CSU’s gold standard.
Last season, a program-record 15 CSU volleyball players met the All-Mountain West Scholar-Athlete designation, led by a 4.0 GPA by the now-graduated Sasha Colombo.
This year’s schedule starts off with a big matchup against North Carolina at 7 p.m. Aug. 26. The non-conference foes are tough, as are the improving Mountain West opponents. CSU, which was tabbed as the regular season favorite by the league’s coaches, hosts the conference tournament Nov. 23-25.
“We come in every day with a championship mindset that (good enough) is just not good enough,” Blackman said. “We want to excel in every area. That’s recruiting. That’s on the court. It’s in the community. It’s in the classroom.”
