How a team mom stepped in to lead a top City volleyball team

A former team mom with no coaching experience keeps Eagle Rock on top of its game

April 16, 2023 4:30 AM PT

It defied all understanding of physics. Inside Taft High’s historic gym in Woodland Hills, dozens of feet up in the air, a few outcropping beams no more than a couple feet wide stretch across the length of the ceiling. And somehow, because high schoolers can be agents of unbridled chaos, a volleyball rested on one of those beams throughout Wednesday afternoon’s match against Eagle Rock.

The match finished in a Taft sweep, Eagle Rock down their best player. Some high school coaches might spray spittle and strain their vocal cords in a postgame meeting afterward. Instead, the eminently agreeable Michelle Hancock told Aidan Avena, one of her senior players, that she’d give him five dollars if he could knock that volleyball on the ceiling from its impossible perch.

Not five seconds later, he flung a ball up to the rafters and knocked it loose. Everyone on the team — including Hancock — started running in no particular direction in giddy shock. And with a big smile, the coach plucked out a $5 bill and handed it to Avena.

“Every team we’ve played against,” said Eagle Rock team captain Zechariah Fuentes, “they’re like, ‘Your coach seems so nice.’”

There’s no getting around it: Hancock radiates major mom vibes. She is 4-foot-something, with thick glasses and rosy cheeks, and try as she might, often cannot resist baking some sort of postgame treat for her players. And indeed, for more than a decade, she was “Mama Hancock” to Eagle Rock, sending three kids through the school’s volleyball programs.

“She was like, super-team mom,” said former head coach Tim Bergeron.

But two years ago, when Bergeron stepped away from the City powerhouse he’d built, Eagle Rock had nobody to take his place. So Hancock — who’d never had a lick of coaching or playing experience in her life — filled in as a last resort.

She’ll be the first to admit it was a strange situation. Yet over the last two years, Hancock has kept Eagle Rock steady as a City Section power, coaching the Eagles to a 28-11 record this year with a unique blend of compassion and curiosity.

“She brings a whole another dynamic to boys’ volleyball, which is traditionally more so coached by men,” Chatsworth coach Sina Aghassy said.

For years, before taking over as head coach, Hancock would show up before or after games with individualized lunches for players. With a number of players coming from single-parent homes, Bergeron remembered, she would treat kids as if they were a part of her own family. Some, quite literally, called her “Mom.”

“I wanted kids to feel like, ‘Hey, I matter,’” Hancock said.

She’s brought the same care to coaching, a unique style that shows there’s more than one way to motivate. Hancock has a teaching background, as a professor of child development for California community colleges. And players feel at ease, Fuentes said, knowing they’ll be supported and not berated.

Hancock’s volleyball knowledge was limited — she hardly knew concepts like rotations, Fuentes said, when she first started. But she’s grown her IQ through sheer determination — she’s had more than 100 conversations with Taft coach Arman Mercado, he estimated, and Aghassy said he’s never seen a City coach “as engaged in the learning process.”

When Bergeron stepped away, he wanted to leave the program in the hands of someone who understood Eagle Rock’s foundational principles: compassion and empathy. He never imagined it’d be Hancock, but she’s upheld those concepts better than anyone he could’ve imagined.

“It shouldn’t be a gender [thing], like, ‘A mom should do that,’” Bergeron said. “Like, no. That’s good coaching.”