THE FRONT ROW WITH BRUCE BOURQUIN: Friday, Sept. 16, 2016

In his search for a volleyball coach four months ago, Trent Derrick, who was Lakeland’s athletic director and is currently the high school’s principal, happened to watch a match at Lakeland Junior High played by a one-year-old club volleyball team, the Volley Extreme.

Derrick had heard from a local parent of one of the Extreme’s players about its coach, Adriano de Souza.

“One of the parents invited Trent Derrick, the A.D., and he got to see us play,” de Souza said recently at the Grille de Ipanema Brazilian steakhouse at the Riverstone complex in Coeur d’Alene he owns along with his wife of 16 years, Wendy. “They asked my to interview with them in May, I was hired in June. I wasn’t planning on being a coach, I was coaching my three daughters on a U14 team in Post Falls. We had girls from Coeur d’Alene, Post Falls, Liberty Lake, all over the area.”

Derrick liked what he saw, of course, from the practices and matches.

“He seemed very knowledgable and had a good presence with the (club) team and parents,” Derrick said.

Afterward, the 40-year-old de Souza (pronounced SO-za) quickly went to work and held an eight-week summer clinic. What has happened since then, especially compared to last season, has been a turnaround thus far, Lakeland’s record is 7-9, and the Hawks have already equaled last year’s wins, when they were 7-17. The Hawks have not won a league match since 2010 and the last time they reached the state tournament was 2005.

“I told them if we go to state, they can eat here for free,” de Souza said.

This season, they’ve gone through workouts with a personal trainer and more weight lifting. de Souza said the current group of girls on the Hawks had never had some of the offseason work done, although Derrick said Lakeland has had several summer camps through the past several seasons.

“They had never had (some of) that before,” de Souza said of the overall offseason work. “We have been working hard, our girls’ confidence has been great. They came from a really negative environment. The last five to six years, there was not a lot of pride in volleyball. Some of them lost interest. So you have to bring a different perspective, from warmups to drills to matches. The girls hungered for something new.”

With the improved record comes some heady expectations with junior outside hitter Mattisyn Cope, an outside hitter and middle blocker who leads the team in kills. The two setters are Brooke Mayberry and Jaylene Mailhot, plus the Hawks run both one- and two-setter attacks, with junior middle blocker Summer Powell in the middle.

“We want to go to state; it’ll be tough,” de Souza said. “Sandpoint is the team we have to beat. Our tallest girl (Cope) is 5-foot-10. They have girls who are 6-foot-2. We have more desire to fight, nobody beats us unless they beat themselves. As long as we don’t quit and keep going, that’s what we ask. One time we lost to Post Falls 25-14, 25-10, then we came back and only lost 25-23. So that shows you they never give up.”

WHAT ARE some of the things that’s pretty interesting about this new coach are quite a few things. de Souza was born and raised in Curitiba, Brazil, a city of approximately 1.8 million, about 525 miles southwest of Rio de Janeiro. He speaks English, Portuguese and Spanish. As a teenager, he played club and semi-pro volleyball as a 6-foot-1 outside hitter for three years for Olympico.

“In Brazil, they say soccer is a religion, volleyball is the No. 1 sport,” said de Souza, who played soccer and volleyball for Pio Lanteri High in Curitiba and like many young athletes, wanted to be a pro soccer player. “There is no college volleyball in Brazil, like there is here in the United States. The weather year-round (in Brazil) is sunny, we played beach volleyball. You could earn $10,000 per year, you’d get a trophy for winning tournaments.”

de Souza, who still plays soccer on occasion in places like Las Vegas and Canada, said the recent Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro was “awesome, good exposure,” came to the United States on a student visa and attended Treasure Valley Community College in Ontario, Ore. He did not play volleyball there, then went to Utah Valley University in 1999-2001. He met his wife, who majored in interior design, in college there and married her in 2000, then the man of Mormon faith went to Brigham Young University in 2004. He was also a club volleyball coach of Champions FC of Highland, Utah. The dual citizen said he has gone back home to Brazil about every four months.

“I was going to school and working on the line at Nestle USA,” de Souza said. “I majored in business and earned my associates degree at UVU. I came here (to Coeur d’Alene) in 2009, where I worked as chef for The Coeur d’Alene Resort for a year and a half. After an internship working for Dockside, Beverly’s and Bonsai Bistro, they hired me.”

de Souza has owned Grille from Ipanema, which reopened two weeks ago after having been located for nearly five years in downtown Coeur d’Alene across from the city library, since 2011.

DERRICK HAS seen a few differences with the volleyball team, from practices to matches.

“He has a very balanced approach to the game,” Derrick said. “He has a great rapport with the kids, I feel his kids play loose and relaxed, which is a good combination. I think the big thing he brought to our program was he really cares about the program, he’s instilled confidence in his girls. We played Lewiston tough and we are moving forward.”

Current AD Tim Cronnelly, who previously served as the AD for Timberlake and has served for 27 years in public education, echoes those thoughts.

“He’s been doing great, he’s been real positive,” Cronnelly said. “I think it’s showing on the court. I can see the players are working hard and having fun. When you’re going that, you’re going to get better. He has high expectations and he holds them accountable. He’s got buy-in from the girls to what he’s teaching.”

And count Chad DeVore as another supporter. DeVore, a dentist at the Lakeland Dental Center in Rathdrum, has two daughters in the Hawks’ program — Kenna, a junior libero, and another on the JV team. His older daughter, Kyra DeVore, was a senior on the Lakeland team last year and now attends Lewis-Clark State College.

“He has been a blessing to us,” Chad DeVore said. “They’re smiling again and having fun buying in. He’s a real cool cat, we’re lucky to have him. When we beat Moscow, he lost his dad this past weekend, he didn’t have to be there. This year’s a building year, next year’s a turning point.”

Bruce Bourquin is a sports writer at The Press. He can be reached at 664-8176, Ext. 2013, via e-mail at [email protected] or via Twitter @bourq25