Joy Gabrielli Gould

I've always been fascinated and inspired by stories of resilience. I love when the underdog overcomes all odds to achieve goals or attain personal greatness. Sport is such a wonderful environment for those stories to play out. My daughter and I have played volleyball together "since I was three years old," she will say. I can't remember how old she was when we first started to play together, but I have clear memories of us playing "indoor pepper" in my bedroom when we moved down to...

My 9th grade year, my high school volleyball was ranked last in the state of NH and, quite probably, that meant we were most likely ranked last in the entirety of the United States. Our school was a very small, private high school - I graduated with a class of 44 students, the largest class in the history of the school. We were ranked in Class "S", which stood for "Small" in a state where the schools were divided into Small, Medium, and Large for sports classes. We only won one set (not...

When I first started coaching at Gordon College, I had little to no idea of what I was doing. I came in with almost no coaching experience, and I shaped my approach to coaching largely from what I had seen as really working well from prior coaches. I also used a lot of what I had seen as not working well from the player perspective to shape how NOT to be as a coach, which shows how important both positive and negative experiences can be for a person's development. Generally, I knew how to...