May 30, 2025

A Conversation With John Mayer

Interview by Joseph Wakelee-Lynch
Photo by Jon Rou

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John Mayer, now in his 10th year as coach, has led the beach volleyball program to a new level of program success at LMU: a second-place finish in the 2025 NCAA Beach Volleyball Championship and a No. 2 ranking, 2025 AVCA National Coach of the Year, six consecutive WCC championships, five straight NCAA tournament appearances, and four straight seasons with a top-five ranking.

You’ve recruited very talented players for several consecutive seasons. That’s competition of its own. What has been your winning strategy?

First, creating the best experience possible for our current players. They’re your best recruiters. We prioritize the experiences of our current athletes and connect them with those we’re recruiting. Resource-wise, we’ve invested more in international and transfer players. We’ve brought in very good players from around the world and attracted good transfers. 

Mid-majors often have a tough time recruiting against Power 5 programs. But LMU has been successful. Is the Power 5/mid-major distinction not as relevant in beach volleyball?

It’s probably not as extreme as it is in basketball or football. Still, there’s an impact. The top blue-chip American recruits are going to the top schools, so it takes a little creativity on our part. We can’t follow the same model as UCLA or Texas. We have to make our own way. In terms of resources, we’ve been very well supported by Craig Pintens, director of Athletics and the staff, and that has allowed us to attract very good players. 

To a casual observer, beach volleyball looks like a much simpler game compared to indoor, six-person volleyball, in which there are many attack strategies to choose from. Is that a misconception?

I think that’s fair in some ways. With fewer people there are fewer plays you can run. The offensive schemes can be simpler. In other ways, it’s more complex, in that the beach environment is constantly changing. In indoor volleyball, you have interactions with lights in the gym and no wind. With beach volleyball, you have to have more complex and adaptable schemes for different environments. But there have been more developments in offenses. Sweden’s 2024 men’s gold medalists brought in jump-setting and a more complex offense. There is more complexity than meets the eye.

What’s the most important quality you need to field a top-five program? Is it a roster that’s very deep in skills down to the last two-person team? 

There was a time seven or eight years ago when there was more separation between your No. 1 team in the program and the No. 5 team. You could get away with good coaching and not having athleticism in the No. 4 and 5 teams. Now you have to have depth 1 through 5. We invest in all of our teams, and we’ve had success with our No. 5 team, especially this season. Our depth is our big strength.

Is the beach volleyball transfer portal qualitatively different than that of basketball?

There are about 60-plus D-1 women’s beach volleyball teams and about 350 men’s basketball teams, so it’s not the same. But we really gear up and prepare for the portal. We spend a lot of time preparing our communications and what we have to offer, for example. Things happen fast. If you don’t know what your needs are, your scholarships, and degree information from our master’s programs, someone else is going to make an offer before you. Showing how interested you are in a player, how organized you are, how quickly you can connect transfers with current players — there’s a whole strategy to it. We won the transfer battle last year. We got the best three, by far.

In the WCC, a lot of fans are tired of seeing Gonzaga’s men’s basketball team dominate the conference year after year. Is LMU’s beach volleyball team becoming the WCC program everyone loves to hate?

I get the sense that there’s a lot of respect for how that program is run, how they carry themselves. Of course, they have a target on their back. You can have a target on your back and be respected or have a target on your back and be a jerk about it and be disrespectful. My hope is that within our conference there is respect for our program and a desire to be the best, and that the other programs are going to do their best to figure out how to beat us.