Karch Kiraly Has One More Olympic Mountain To Climb At LA28

As Los Angeles prepares to host the Olympic Games, volleyball’s greatest champion believes Team USA has unfinished business.

(This is part one of a two-part story based on a Forbes exclusive interview with Karch Kiraly July 3, 2026. All quotes are taken directly from a transcript of the interview.)

Southern California Is Volleyball Mecca

The road to the 2028 Olympic Games officially runs through Los Angeles. For volleyball, however, it has been running through Southern California for decades. The sport is deeply woven into the fabric of the region. Beach volleyball icons emerged from the sands of Manhattan Beach. Elite indoor athletes sharpened their skills in packed gyms stretching from Orange County to the San Fernando Valley. Thousands of aspiring Olympians spend weekends competing in tournaments where dozens of courts fill cavernous convention centers and athletic facilities.

Few venues better symbolize that pipeline than the American Sports Center in Anaheim, where club tournaments routinely draw families from across the country. It is one familiar to Karch Kiraly: Southern California continues to be a mecca for developing and producing the next generation of Olympic hopefuls.

It was fitting, then, that Kiraly was speaking from Anaheim as preparations continue for another Olympic cycle, one that may become the defining chapter of an extraordinary career.

The Greatest Of All Time

For nearly half a century, Kiraly has stood at the center of American volleyball excellence.

As a player, he won Olympic gold medals indoors in 1984 and 1988 before redefining beach volleyball by capturing another Olympic title in 1996, becoming the first athlete to win Olympic gold in both disciplines. As a coach, he guided the United States women’s national team to its first Olympic gold medal in Tokyo before adding a silver medal in Paris three years later.

Now, with less than two years remaining before Los Angeles welcomes the world, Kiraly has accepted perhaps the most intriguing challenge of his career: leading the United States men’s national team onto the Olympic stage in front of a home crowd that will hope for more than another bronze medal.

“We’re hungry to stand a little higher on the podium,” Kiraly said during the interview.

It is a simple statement, but one that reveals the mindset surrounding a program that believes it has been much closer to Olympic gold than recent medal counts suggest. The United States earned bronze medals at both the Rio 2016 and Paris 2024 Olympic Games. To outsiders, those finishes confirmed America’s place among the world’s volleyball elite. Inside the national team, they represented opportunities that slipped away by the narrowest of margins.

“The only loss the USA men had in Paris was in the semifinals,” Kiraly said, recalling the heartbreaking 15–13 fifth-set defeat to Poland. “That meant the best we could finish was third, and we did exactly that.”

For Kiraly, bronze is respected.

It simply isn’t the final destination.

That perspective is one reason USA Volleyball turned to the sport’s most accomplished figure following the conclusion of his remarkable tenure with the women’s national team. His résumé of wins and losses speaks for itself, but even more important was the winning culture he built over sixteen years inside the women’s program.

“I felt like my work with the women was done,” Kiraly explained. “I was excited for a new challenge.”

USA Men’s Volleyball: A Program Already Rising

That challenge was not rebuilding a struggling program. Far from it. Former head coach John Speraw had established one of the strongest men’s national programs in the world. The Americans possessed experienced leadership, world-class talent and a locker room that consistently competed with volleyball’s traditional powers, including Poland, Italy, Brazil and France. “There was nothing broken with the program,” Kiraly said. “It’s a really good group of guys.” Instead of overhauling systems or dramatically changing tactics, Kiraly spent much of his first season listening.

“2025 was a year of learning,” he said. “Learning these people, learning about them both as people and about their families, and also learning about them as players.”

That answer may have been the most revealing of the entire conversation. Championship coaches often speak about systems, rotations, analytics or match strategy. Kiraly began somewhere entirely different—with relationships.

The day before our interview, the national team held what Kiraly described as an informal family day inside the gym. Wives, fiancées and children mingled around practice while players prepared for another international competition.

“We probably had six or seven kids in the gym,” Kiraly said. “It was just awesome.”

Coaching Beyond X’s And O’s

Moments like that rarely appear on television broadcasts, but they reveal something important about how Kiraly approaches leadership. For him, building an Olympic team begins long before the first serve. It begins by understanding the people who will eventually have to trust one another when an Olympic semifinal hangs in the balance.

That philosophy may prove particularly valuable over the next two years as veterans and emerging stars compete for roster spots on a team that believes playing at home presents a once-in-a-generation opportunity.

Kiraly’s challenge is not simply identifying the twelve best volleyball players in America.

It is creating the strongest team.

That distinction could determine whether the United States finally climbs from bronze to gold when the Olympic spotlight returns to Los Angeles.

(Part two of this story will be published July 11, 2026)