Redondo girls volleyball coach Tommy Chaffins not slowing down after reaching 900 wins

By Damian Calhoun | Daily Breeze

Redondo girls volleyball coach Tommy Chaffins reached 900 career wins earlier this season.

The milestone win came Oct. 8 against El Segundo.

“It means I’m old,” Chaffins said with a laugh. “It means that I’ve coached a lot of great players and I thank them. I’m not easy. I expect mentally and physically to be prepared to play and I challenge people and players.

“But I just appreciate the support of the community for the past 30 years, to let me kind of do my thing. Because at the end of the day, I care about their life and them learning life lessons through sports. And life can be tough and often is, and sports is a great opportunity to have a little microcosm of that and how we deal.”

One way Redondo deals with adversity is to focus on what’s next.

“Team is a little disappointed, we got swept against our rivals, we wanted to come in and beat them and we didn’t,” Chaffins said after the Oct. 15 loss against Mira Costa. “So we talked about you have to move on to the next play, get better and dwelling on the past will not improve the future.”

Chaffins’ coaching dream was put into motion as a teenager, he said, after reading John’s Wooden’s “They Call Me Coach.”

“I read it when I was 15 years old and it changed my life and I knew I was going to be a coach,” he said. “He changed a lot of lives and hopefully I’ve changed some lives for the better and that’s very satisfying to me when I see people that are now pushing 50, that I’ve coached and there’s a bond there that means the world to me.

“I read that book and I knew I was going to be a basketball coach, but I ended up being a volleyball coach. To this day, I’m always thinking, at least coaching-wise, what would Wooden do? If I get close to what he would do, then I’m probably not doing too bad.”

Asked if he has a number of wins in mind he wants to reach next, Chaffins said no, adding that he just wants the “next win.”