When Chris Lamb was hired as Wichita State’s head volleyball coach, he told The Sunflower that he was focused on doing whatever possible to “help this team become better.”

Twenty-five years later, mission accomplished. Under Lamb’s leadership, the Wichita State volleyball program has transformed from a middling team that had never won its conference to a consistently contending powerhouse coming off its first national championship trophy.

“We just kept winning more and more every single year,” Lamb said. “I don’t know; (it’s) just me trying to recruit athletes and coach them up as volleyball players. I know it’s never changed.”

Known as “Lambo” by players and fans, the coach’s 25th anniversary at Wichita State was recognized at Charles Koch Arena on Friday. Thirty-three Shocker volleyball alumnae returned to profess Lamb’s impact on Wichita State’s volleyball program — and their own lives.

“He was a phenomenal coach,” said alumna Elizabeth Walker, formerly Elizabeth Meyers. “I am so happy I made the decision to come here. I tell people that all the time. I’m proud of him for continuing 25 years.”

Becoming a coach

Lamb said when he played sports growing up, he always felt like the “IQ kid.”

“I just kind of was a rule follower,” he said. “So (if) they (the coaches) say, ‘We’re doing this,’ I was doing that. They say, ‘We’re trying this,’ I was trying that. And … I can remember being, as a little kid, out in left field wondering why the other little kids didn’t know where to throw the ball, you know, like, ‘Let’s go.’”

Lamb said he played a lot of volleyball during open gym sessions at his high school on Monday nights.

“I would always decide, ‘Am I going to watch ‘Monday Night Football’ or go play volleyball?’” he said. “My dad let me drive our old orchard truck, even though I wasn’t 16 yet. He let me take the tour of the back roads to go play volleyball every now and then.”

Coaches throughout his childhood told a young Lamb that he should become a coach himself. Lamb said he “kept getting recruited up the ladder.” Throughout the years, Lamb moved from high school volleyball coaching to being an assistant coach at California State University, Bakersfield, to assisting at the University of Arizona, to the WSU head coaching job.

“I just kind of just felt like a tumbleweed going where the wind was going to blow me,” he said.

Arrival at Wichita State

Lamb said former WSU athletic director Jim Schaus “did everything right” in recruiting him to Wichita. At the time, the Wichita State volleyball program was coming off a 9-22 season, its seventh straight without a winning record.

“I thought that, you know, maybe they just need a fresh start,” Lamb said. “Maybe (they) just need to hit the reset button. And I’ll just come in here with a lot of energy and a lot of hope and see if I can do it. And it worked out.”

Walker was part of Lamb’s first freshman recruiting class in 2001. She said she thought he was “personable and engaging” when trying to recruit her.

“He sold me an up-and-coming team,” Walker said. “He was trying to turn the team around. And it was just something that I wanted to be a part of.”

Turn the team around, he did. In the first five years of Lamb’s tenure, the Shockers’ record improved each season. During that stretch, Wichita State won the Missouri Valley Conference and made the NCAA Tournament for the first time.

“That (graduating) class of 2004 and 2005, I mean, what I’ll always say is they were willing to come to Wichita State when coming to Wichita State wasn’t all that cool,” Lamb said.

Walker said Lamb “saw the end game” for the team and helped them realize their potential.

“He had something special with all of us and just growing this team,” Walker said. “And that’s why, I mean, I think you see so many alumni come back and to support him this weekend for the 25th anniversary.”

Synthesis, not analysis

During press conferences, Lamb tends to calculate metrics by hand to help explain what went right or wrong during a game. It’s one aspect of how he uses math to gain an advantage over other teams and coaches.

When he first entered coaching in the late 1980s, Lamb said he was “shocked” at the lack of advanced metrics in volleyball. So he decided to make them himself, learning from mathematics professors on the side.

“At the same time I’m coaching, I’m also in classes where we’re breaking down data,” Lamb said. “And I’m like, ‘Well, how do I find this stuff? How do I do correlations? How do I do standard deviations?’ And they taught me that, and that helped me do this.”

Lamb said his numbers, which he uses to track players’ progress throughout the season and make decisions, help keep his “eye on the ball.”

“Math doesn’t lie to me,” he said. “I just think, with all the decisions that you can make and wonder if it’s right or wrong, I feel that gets you about as close to objective as you can be. And there’s a lot of foundation and objectivity.”

Walker and Emily Stockman, who played for Lamb from 2007-2009, marveled at how his volleyball brain works. Stockman remembered coming into the practice gym at 6 a.m. one morning and seeing Lamb scribbling on a whiteboard.

“He was like, ‘I had a dream last night. I had a dream of this drill, and we’re going to do it today,’” Stockman said. “And he was scribbling things. And I was like, ‘Lambo, you should go to bed for a couple hours’ … (It’s) just the way his brain works. And just, he’s always thinking about the team.”

Lamb said he does fewer experiments than he used to because he feels “pretty comfortable” with his current numbers. While some might call Lamb’s process “analytics,” he prefers to refer to it as synthesis. 

“I’m more creative,” he said. “I’m more putting things into a problem. If anybody is going to accuse me of being analytical, then (that has) been learned. I’m not wired for that.”

Analogies, hand gestures and text messages

Walker and Stockman brought up numerous hallmarks of Lamb’s coaching and management style, from his workouts to hand gestures to analogies.

“He’d say, ‘Corner up,’ and then he’d give us analogies, examples and what he was trying to explain, or what he wanted us to execute,” Walker said. “And I think that just resonated with me, just being able to put things into perspective of what he was trying to explain, and he just made us laugh … with his hand gestures he was constantly doing, on all fours.”

Another aspect of Lamb’s success is his relationships with his players. Lamb’s eldest daughter was Walker’s flower girl at her wedding. She said he still invites her to lunch with his family when he’s in town. 

Stockman said Lamb still texts her as well.

“He actually cares about you as a human outside of the volleyball court,” Stockman said. “So you want to come back. You want to support everything that he’s doing. And you see that with the alumni that come here. He’s built something beautiful.”

Lamb described himself as “pretty much who I’ve always been.” He expressed gratitude that he got his start at Wichita State before the recent increases in the transfer portal and changes to recruiting. He said fans and athletes today have a “shorter fuse with patience on things.”

“If somebody said, ‘Wow, look where we were 25 years ago, and look to where we’ve gotten.’ Well, I don’t know if it would be the same doing that exact job today,” Lamb said. “I don’t know how often that’s going to happen anymore.”

Passion and future

Lamb acknowledged that many of his coaching friends who began their careers around the same time as him are either retired or talking about retirement, something he’s also thinking about.

“We talk about life after volleyball,” he said. “So, yeah … you think about it. But I also can’t wait to wake up every morning and go to practice … I think I’m better now than I’ve ever been. And growth is healthy. Growth makes you feel young.”

Lamb compared coaching to solving a satisfying puzzle. While he can list off many successful seasons, from an undefeated regular season in 2008 to an NCAA Sweet 16 appearance in 2012 to hosting the first round of the NCAA tournament in 2016, he’s most proud of getting the best out of every team and keeping them competitive every season.

“I’m so proud that you can’t name a year where we weren’t relevant,” he said. “And that’s not as easy to do as you think.”

Lamb said when he was hired, he couldn’t have imagined still being at WSU more than 25 years later — but now, he can’t imagine leaving.

“I will wake up every morning early and get to work early and work hard every day, whether you put me in a car wash or you give me the Stanford volleyball job,” Lamb said. “It’s always been, go to work, and this is where I work. I got a job. This is my job.”