LEXINGTON, Ky. - The American Volleyball Coaches Association (AVCA) is pleased to announce its Thirty Under 30 Awards. This award was created in 2009 to honor up-and-coming coaching talent at all levels of the sport.  To qualify for the award nominees had to be younger than 30 years old in 2010. The list of winners will be featured in the upcoming April/May edition of Coaching Volleyball magazine. Wentworth Head Men's Volleyball Coach Rob Mullowney, who is in his second season directing the Leopards, has been selected as one of the recipients.

"The most exciting thing about this award is how difficult it is getting to select just 30 winners from the hundreds of nominations," said AVCA Executive Director, Kathy DeBoer. "Congratulations to this outstanding class.  The future of our sport is in good hands."

Of the thirty recipients, 18 are head coaches and 12 are assistant coaches. Eight are NCAA Division I women's coaches, four coach NAIA women's squads, three are NCAA Division II women's coaches, three are NCAA Division III women's coaches, two are club coaches, two are from Two-Year Colleges, two coach high school girls programs, one is a high school boys coach and one is an NAIA men's coach.

Also, one of the recipients doubles-up a club coach, while one is the head coach of both the men's and women's teams at the Division III level.  Five of this year's recipients - Casey Dale (2010), Coley Pawlikowski (2009), Barrett Schitka (2010), Lauren Steinbrecher (2009) and Erin Virtue (2010) - are repeat recipients, while Giovana Melo has received the award in each of the three years since the program's inception.

Mullowney, 28, who also serves as the Head Women's Volleyball Coach at the United States Coast Guard Academy, is in his second season as the Leopards' head coach, amassing a 31-16 (.660) record, which included a 16-10 record in his first season.  The 16 wins were seven more than the previous season and marked the first time the program had finished above .500 since the 2001 campaign.  This season Wentworth is 15-6, having won 14 of its last 16 matches after a 1-4 start.

A collegiate volleyball coach for eight seasons, he has compiled a 125-50 record as a head coach (four seasons as Coast Guard's women's coach; two seasons as Wentworth's men's coach) and as an assistant coach for the Haverford and Smith women's teams and the Elms and Newbury men's squads, he helped those teams to a 106-71 mark.

He has coached three different All-Americans, an Academic All-American, a regional Rookie of the Year, one female and one male AVCA National Player of the Week, and 26 all-conference selections.  As the men's assistant coach, he helped Newbury College to an AVCA Poll top 15 finish in 2009.  As the women's assistant at Smith College in 2005, he helped the team to its first NCAA appearance since 1988.  This past fall he guided Coast Guard to the NEWMAC Championship and the second round of the NCAA Tournament, which came on the heels of the Bears winning the 2009 ECAC New England Championship.

(Portions of this release courtesy of the AVCA)

-Full AVCA Release-