Heather Olmstead

Heather Olmstead, Brigham Young University’s women’s volleyball head coach, was named 2018 American Volleyball Coaches Association national coach of the year. The 2018 season found her team in the Final Four of the NCAA Division 1 tournament and earned them a West Coast Conference championship. The team also ranked as the top team in the country for a stretch during the season and had an undefeated run of home games.

Olmstead has been head coach since 2015 and has won 90 percent of her games during this period. She was named WCC coach of the year in 2015. In 2014 she was associate head coach to her brother Shawn, the year he was named national coach of the year (he was women’s volleyball head coach from 2011 to 2014; he is now men’s volleyball head coach). From 2011 to 2013, she was assistant coach.

Olmstead earned a degree in family and consumer science in 2002 from Utah State University, where she also played volleyball from 1998 to 2001, starting each year. She played for the United States Professional Volleyball team in 2002–2003, and played for the European Professional Volleyball league in 2003. She was assistant coach at Utah State University from 2003 to 2005, and assistant coach at University of Utah from 2006 to 2010. She served as head coach of the Intermountain Volleyball Association High Performance Select Team in Florida July 2010. She also coached the IVA HP team at the 2006 Global Challenge in Maribor, Slovenia.

She comes from a volleyball family—all seven of her siblings played volleyball in high school and four of them played in college. Her father, Rick Olmstead, played volleyball at BYU-Hawaii and coached the sport in high school.

She is a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.