THE FRONT ROW with BRUCE BOURQUIN Nov. 13, 2015

During a fairly quick four-year span, North Idaho College volleyball coach Kelsey Stanley has already paid her dues.

Stanley was hired as a volunteer assistant coach on former coach Kandice Kelly (now Gregorak)’s staff in 2012. She was a year out of college, just 23 years old.

“I was fortunate to be able to volunteer for Kandice Kelly at that time,” Stanley said. “I wanted to kind of be a part of volleyball and keep myself busy and so I asked if I could help out. I was the same age as someone on the team. The year after, the assistant coach, Linda Hall (now Foreman) left and Kandice hired me. Kandice got married and moved to Missoula with her husband and she was an assistant with the University of Montana for a couple of years and she had kids and decided to stay home.”

In only her second season as NIC head coach, Stanley, now 27, has already led her team to the NJCAA national tournament, to be held Nov. 19-21 in Casper, Wyo.

On Thursday, the Cardinals were seeded 10th in the tourney, and will play No. 7 Missouri State University-West Plains in the first round next Thursday.

WITH HER husband of four years, NIC assistant wrestling coach Keri Stanley, having moved to NIC to continue his coaching career in 2011, after he coached four years at Dickinson State University in Dickinson, N.D., Kelsey moved to Coeur d’Alene to be with her husband and in 2012, she began her coaching career.

“With my husband being the assistant coach here, I was here a lot,” Stanley said. “And so I got to know Kandice and we just hit it off, right from the get-go. She wanted the help, you can always use a helping hand in practice and I wasn’t able to come a lot. I was only able to come during preseason, because I student taught at Skyway Elementary School in Coeur d’Alene. During matches I helped them with their stats. So I found a way to help them in any way I could.”

This year, Stanley’s team went 9-3 in the Scenic West Athletic Conference (20-13 overall), behind College of Southern Idaho, which is No. 2 in the NJCAA national rankings. This came after a rookie season in which the Cardinals were 11-11 (4-6) and were seeded fourth in the Region 18 tournament, losing to then-No. 1 CSI in four games in the semifinals.

“Last year was really hard for me,” Stanley said. “Only because I had a brand new baby (Aida). That was definitely a struggle for me, having to leave her on the weekends. She was born April of 2014. So that was hard. Just the fact that I missed out on recruiting, because I was gone on maternity leave. Learning to balance family and the team was definitely a big hurdle I had to jump. But going into this year, I knew what to expect. I knew what I wanted, I recruited the girls I wanted.”

All this and the then-new mother went through the transition from being an assistant coach, then interim and eventually the head coach. As an interim coach, Stanley never actually coached a match, but she did plenty as a recruiter and stat keeper, among other things.

“I’ve learned a lot the past four years,” Stanley said. “I learned the most last year, you learn more and more when you do it. When you’re an assistant, you’re in the background. But until you’re actually the head coach, you don’t know and you learn as you go. We had a very good team, but the way things fell, we were fourth in the conference, so we had to play the No. 1 team in the nation in CSI. So we knew they’d have to have the absolute worst match of their life and we’d have to have the best match of our lives to be able to beat them. We just didn’t have depth like we did this year, which is huge because in practice, you have to have good people to practice against.”

This year, NIC beat every four-year school in the NAIA except one, Eastern Oregon University, which the Cardinals lost to in five games. NIC beat Lewis-Clark State College in four games.

“This year, just coming in, I knew we had a good shot and that was our goal from the get-go, was to have a shot at nationals. The difference was we had girls who are very competitive and know what it takes to win. In practice they get after it. It always seemed like when we played the teams that counted, we’d do well. We’d go to the NAIA matches, because it’s good competition and we wanted to play the best. It was nice to play near home.”

Back to their children. Kelsey is expecting another baby, due in March. And no, they don’t know whether it’s a boy or girl or what his or her name will be just yet. It doesn’t necessarily hurt that Keri coaches in the winter and Kelsey is finished coaching matches in the late fall.

“We intertwine at three weeks,” Kelsey said. “His family is up here helping us take care of the kids. We take turns taking care of them.”

The two met at Dickinson State in 2009 and married in August 2011. Before she attended Dickinson State, Kelsey was a three-sport athlete at Bottineau High in Bottineau, N.D., where she was an all-state player in volleyball as well as a state pole vault champ. She was named North Dakota’s high school Athlete of the Year in 2006.

AFTER A 2012 season in which NIC finished eighth in the nation, Kelly resigned in order to be closer to her husband, Ty Gregorak, who has served as the defensive coordinator of the University of Montana football team for four seasons and has spent the past 12 serving as its linebackers coach. Stanley slid into the interim head coaching spot during the offseason starting January of 2013, before coach Miles Kydd was hired. After Kydd resigned in January of 2014, Stanley again served as the interim coach, before she was hired as the head coach last May.

“I was fortunate he (Kydd) kept me on,” Stanley said. “Being the interim coach, it was fine. I had no worries about transitioning (to being the head coach). It worked out just fine.”

NIC athletic director Al Williams said Stanley was the right fit, after he chose to hire Kydd, who had earlier coached Eastern Washington University, before resigning for personal reasons.

“She was a young coach,” Williams said. “First time even as an assistant at the coach level. She wasn’t quite ready to take on the reins the first time around. After a year under her belt with a Division-I level coach, she gained enough experience to get a trial run at the position.”

Williams went with the familiar face who had been there all along.

“I think what sold me on her was her enthusiasm and her desire to have the job,” Williams said. “Experience-wise, she may not have been ready, but she sold me on her passion for wanting to be given the chance.”

During every NIC volleyball match I’ve covered, the Cardinals appear to be organized, very unselfish, dangerous on the edges with their hitters, solid passers and servers and pretty strong defensive players as well.

“I think that’s her strength is she’s a good teacher,” Williams said. “I think she learned that from her prior two coaches, to play everyone early and not worry about your record, to give the kids some experience, so when the matches do matter, they’re ready.”

Stanley is not the first NIC volleyball coach with less than a few years’ experience to reach nationals, but she’s among the ones with the least overall experience.

“We’ve been fortunate,” Williams said. “Every coach we’ve hired since I’ve been here has taken the team to nationals. So we’ve had a little turnover. But we’ve had success with first-year coaches. She’s the youngest in terms of level of experience to have done this (reach nationals) in my time here. It’s been impressive.”

WITH NIC going into a more regionally-based Northwest Athletic Conference next season, with no national tournament like the NJCAA does, the challenges during the past year of recruiting a player who has national title aspirations, yet is someone the Cardinals can convince to stick around once nationals are no longer an option, can be a difficult one.

But Stanley is pretty optimistic she has done that and will continue to do just fine on the recruiting trail. During the past offseason, she has recruited key players like setter Brittany Gay of Lake City, Brazilian hitter Julia Silva and middle blocker Brooke Bell.

“Once we get them to NIC, they stay,” Stanley said. “We have a wonderful campus, a wonderful facility. We’re fortunate to be, I think, the nicest, coolest campus in any junior college there is. The lake does not hurt at all. I always say get them here, show them the campus and we’ve got ’em. But we are going to have our challenges with getting girls in that are wanting to play at nationals. What they can understand is NIC is very well-known around the country with the D-I schools or D-II, III, whatever it is. Almost every year, 90 to 95 percent of our girls go on to play at four-year schools and we’ll have the same thing this year. I usually have one out of eight that don’t end up playing at a four-year school. Last year our team GPA was a 3.0. We stress for girls to succeed off the court. Once you’re done playing volleyball, you have to have a degree.”

So Stanley has certainly earned her volleyball coaching degree, so to speak. And she’s just getting started.

Bruce Bourquin is a sports writer at The Press. He can be reached at 664-8176, Ext. 2013, via e-mail at bbourquin@cdapress.com or via Twitter @bourq25