When UTRGV volleyball head coach Todd Lowery hired Vini Baigan as an assistant coach in 2015, Baigan had concerns about two things.
“During my interview, I told him there were two things I wasn’t comfortable with,” Baigan said. “They were planning practices and if I don’t go home to Brazil twice a year, I think I will freak out because I’m very attached to my family.
“He was fine with that.”
During Baigan’s second day on the job, Lowery told him at 3 p.m., “I need you to plan practice for tonight’s summer camp.”
“I was like, ‘I just told you,” said Baigan, who was named associate head coach in May. “But I’m very thankful, because he made me come out of my shell.
“Todd is a very nice person and everybody knows that so I think the way we push each other is good. I’m the negative side, he’s the positive side. We keep the balance.”
Lowery began his collegiate coaching career in 2002 and has done nothing but win, turning everything he touches into gold. In his first year as a head volleyball coach in 2002, at National American University, Lowery amassed a 41-0 record and went on to win the first of two NAIA national championships while there.
He won two more titles at the University of Texas at Brownsville/Texas Southmost College.
He’s the winningest coach at both of those schools and, recently, he completed a trifecta, becoming the winningest volleyball coach as well at UTRGV.
Maybe even more impressive is the fact that in his 20-plus year career, he has never been an assistant coach
Lowery became the winningest head coach in UTRGV program history Sept. 9 when the Vaqueros beat the North Dakota State Bison 25-22, 25-22, 25-19.. The team has won four straight since then, putting them on a 10-match win streak and with a 10-1 record.
Now with 115 wins, Lowery is ahead of David Thorn (1998-2006) for the top spot. The win over NDSU was also Lowery’s 27th neutral site victory, tying him with Thorn for the program record. Lowery is also the program holder in home wins (52) and 11 other categories since being named head coach Jan. 9, 2015.
Lowery had guided the program to its only two NCAA Division I postseason appearances, including the 2016 NCAA Tournament and the 2021 NIVC, while leading his team to the 2018 Western Athletic Conference (WAC) Championship and 2016 WAC Tournament Championship.
Lowery’s earliest success as a coach – his first season, rather, his first game – is a story unlike any, it’s fascinating and quite possible made for TV. National American University, in Rapid City, South Dakota, had decided to rid itself of all sports – except for volleyball and rodeo. Their volleyball head coach left and only four players were on the roster when Lowery accepted the job.
His interview was in June, practice began in July.
“I knew one of the players, she was from Brazil and she said, ‘I know some players we can bring in,’” Lowery said. “The administration said OK if that’s what I wanted.
“So we brought in these four freshmen and they showed up a couple of days before the first match. We played the entire season with eight kids, no liberos and the middles were playing six rotations. It was just a special group. They took us to the national title and I mean ‘they’ took us.”
He has brought success with him everywhere since Day 1.
“Todd is great to work with. The passion he has for young people and student athletes is second to one. Look at what he’s done even before here with the UTB program. He’s a championship caliber coach,” said Chasse Conque, UTRGV’s vice president and director of athletics. “He also has been an athletic director for a couple years at UTB so he understands the big picture.
“He’s a team player and knows all boats rise with the high tide. In my mind I’ll consider him the dean of coaches. He understands the Valley, his fingerprints are all over the region, what he means to the sport, what his family mean to the sport and he certainly has great ties and connection.
While most fans may connect success to only wins, losses or Xs and Os, there’s much more than that if a coach is going to find real long-term success, from being a strategist to a sales-pitch artist/recruiter, to a sounding board for players, coaches and more and to be a developer of athletes, and young people in general. So far, Lowery’s report card in those areas is nothing but straight As.
UTRGV’s biggest name and hitter, Sarah Cruz, credits Lowery for helping her make it to what is now her final season. The 6-foot-2 graduate student from the Czech Republic leads UTRGV in kills, was named the WAC player of the Week twice already this season and is a probable candidate for WAC Player of the Year.
Her UTRGV career, however, didn’t necessarily start on that golden path.
“We started very bad in the beginning because I don’t think we had a really good relationship because of the things I was doing,” Cruz said. “I had a long-distance boyfriend and wasn’t really paying attention at practice.
“I think he was really pissed about that and then it was my second year I started to play but I think I was on the (bad) list. He has an A list and that other list. I was definitely on the other list. We have a good relationship now, though, because I’m able to be coached and I wasn’t able to be coached – I was to stuck on my ex and didn’t really have it as a priority.”
Getting players to develop, many times comes down to the mental aspect of the game. UTRGV’s roster is loaded with players from Brazil, Greece, Romania and elsewhere around the world. Making an adjustment to leave home and end up thousands of miles away can work on every aspect of a person’s being – heart, mind and soul.
“When she first came she was very attached to her boyfriend and just was distracted. Over the years as we got her focused in more she learned what it means to be part of a team and having support from her teammates. That has taken pressure off of her. She felt a ton of pressure to perform at a super high level – that it was the only way people were going to like her.”
Lowery recognized Cruz was tying her self worth to Sarah the volleyball player and not Sarah the person.
“Before, if she didn’t perform or had a bad day she felt like nobody liked her. That wasn’t the case,” Lowery said.
“It all goes back to that first team. I was still learning the game at that point in my career but the one thing throughout my career I’ve been successful at is developing the mental side of the game. To get kids to play together, to buy into a program and a process. That’s all those conversations with Sarah. Everybody in the country knew she was a great volleyball player, but could we fix those other things. And all you’ve seen is her getting better and better and better.”
Meanwhile the wins keep coming for Lowery, once appropriately referred to as The Coach with the Midas Touch, turning everything — from a team with four players two days before a season starts, to a coach who doesn’t feel comfortable planning practices, to a player going from the not-so-nice list to a superstar — into gold.
