Leonid Yelin looked around at the players on his roster. Some of them he would have recruited. Others were athletes the Uzbekistan native would have never considered.

Yelin came to Syracuse in 2012 to change its volleyball culture. He had been a part of 14 NCAA tournaments as the head coach of Louisville. He had seen gyms packed to the point where the fire department was called. His whole career, he hadn’t just been a part of a winning culture — he had helped create it. And when he looked at the SU roster in his first season, he knew the Orange didn’t have one.

Yelin took aside some players on that 2012 team and told them he wouldn’t be able to coach them.

“Changing the culture, it’s just so hard,” Yelin said. “When building (a) program, the culture you’re going to change if you bring (the) right people.

“I don’t know how to work with players who (I would not) have recruited.”

Yelin doesn’t mince words. Not with his players, assistant coaches or the media. Seven of the nine freshmen from the 2011 season were no longer on the roster in 2013. He expects a lot and he’s honest about it. But while the methods may seem harsh, Yelin’s results are unquestionable.

He’s been one of the most successful volleyball coaches in NCAA history, amassing 510 wins over 21 seasons and a .737 winning percentage that ranks among the all-time greats of Division I coaches. After winning a Division II national championship at Barry University, he developed the Louisville program into a perennial national title contender.

“You’re not always gonna win,” said Stephanie Cantway, who was both a player and assistant coach under Yelin, “and you’re not always going to make him happy.”

After a 12-18 record in his first season, followed by a 16-16 mark in 2013, winning is coming more slowly than it ever has for Yelin.

“A lot of people (don’t) even know, in the school, in the city (that) we have (a) volleyball team here,” Yelin said. “I don’t blame them, I blame us. We’ve just got to do better so they will know.”

When Yelin first came to the United States in 1989 from Uzbekistan to escape the Soviet Union with his family, he didn’t speak a word of English. He thought his life as a volleyball coach was finished.

He laid tiles on the floors of hospitals. Then he was a deliveryman at Pizza Hut. His next job was a salesman of ladies fragrances.

“If it’s not going to happen, if I’m never able to get back to coaching volleyball, at least I wouldn’t shoot myself,” Yelin said he thought at the time. “Worst case scenario, you’re going to be a taxi driver.”

He believed that he wouldn’t be that same star volleyball coach that led the women’s national team to a Soviet Union championship in 1978.

But Yelin was discovered at a local volleyball club and offered a job coaching at Barry University in Miami, Florida, a small Division II school that he said had about 1,500 undergraduate students.

Yelin unknowingly accepted the head coaching position after his initial interview, but didn’t show up on the first day. His English was so poor that he never realized he’d been offered the position to begin with.

“That was a different level of language I didn’t even understand,” Yelin said. “I didn’t understand 90 percent of what (they were) talking about.”

Yelin excelled at Barry despite the language barrier. He said the less talking that he did, the better, and that the players were still receptive to his technical demonstrations.

Five years later, in 1996, he was offered the job at Louisville. There, he made championships an expectation.

“He’s very honest,” Cantway said. “He’s tough. But you know what you’re getting when you walk in and when you leave and every day in between.”

Cantway said that as a freshman in 2003, she learned this the hard way. She didn’t want to follow all the rules, she didn’t want to be perfect. She didn’t want to focus.

So Yelin took her into his office and laid out all the things that she needed to change, and she made adjustments.

As an assistant coach to Yelin at Louisville and Syracuse, Cantway admired his seemingly impossible passion for volleyball. She remembered times when the Cardinals would get home at 2 a.m. from a road trip, only to have Yelin babble about different scores from around the country when the coaches met up again at 7 a.m.

“The neat thing about working with him is that he’d go through things five or six different ways,” said Rick Nold, a former assistant with Yelin at Louisville. “There’d be different experiences with different players. It was good to learn so many different things and different ways to approach a situation.”

Yelin has a certain type of player that he likes to have. One that is willing to learn and one that wants to win as much as he does.

Now, 12 of the 15 players on the roster have played their entire Syracuse career for Yelin. Last season, Syracuse finished fifth in the Atlantic Coast Conference after being projected to finish twelfth.

This year the Orange is picked to finish eighth, despite boasting a relatively inexperienced roster. Just two years after tearing apart and rebuilding the foundation of the Syracuse program, he’s starting to mold it into his own.

“Instead of (bringing) somebody and trying to change, you better bring somebody who you need and you don’t have to change,” Yelin said. “That’s the right thing … The quantity, is not necessarily going to transfer into quality.”

Published on September 4, 2014 at 12:11 am

Contact Sam: sblum@syr.edu | @SamBlum3