Smith College Volleyball Head Coach to Lead USA Paralympic Team

Greg Walker has been busy since becoming head coach of the Smith College volleyball team in 2020. The team has made it to the postseason every year, and in 2024, the team won their first NEWMAC championship and made it to the second round of the NCAA tournament for the first time in nearly 20 years.

Walker will soon be adding another coaching accomplishment: In 2028, he will lead the USA Men’s National Sitting Volleyball Team as they compete in the Summer Paralympic Games for the second time.

“It’s incredible,” Walker says. “There’s so much support around this team, but I think what I’m most excited about is just experiencing all of this with the athletes.”

His Smith team’s reaction to the news?

“Oh, they’re thrilled,” Walker says. “They’re all excited. Being involved with Team USA makes me a better coach, which makes them better players. [The Smith team] is just so great.”

The key difference between sitting volleyball and traditional volleyball can be found in the name: Instead of standing, all players must remain seated throughout the course of the game, which is also played with a lower net. 

It’s been a medaling sport in the Summer Paralympics since 1980 for men, and 2004 for women, but Walker first encountered it in 2013 during a coaching education program at the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Training Center in Colorado.

That experience helped transform his coaching style. “You don’t realize that so much of coaching education is really based on male, able-bodied athletes,” Walker says. “That’s the thing I love about being here. It’s like a safe haven,” he says, noting that the biases he’s seen in the past are absent in Smith athletics.

Walker began as a sitting volleyball assistant coach, rising through the ranks before eventually being named head USA Volleyball team coach in 2016. Many of the team’s major accomplishments—including qualification for the 2016 Paralympic Games in Rio de Janeiro and the 2028 Summer Paralympic Games in Los Angeles—happened with Walker at the helm.

Since completing the Olympic coaching education program and beginning his time as head coach at Smith, Walker has also identified what’s important to him about working with student-athletes. 

“It’s all about relationships,” he says. “I tell [Smith players] all the time, they’re not just athletes, they’re not just students. They’re so many things, and they can bring themselves into each one. I want to work my tail off so that I can help them do whatever it is they want to do.”