After 31 years and a combined 944 wins over his career at RUHS, Tommy Chaffins, the girls volleyball head coach is ready to hand off the title to someone new.
“I’ve been thinking about how to make the program better for 31 straight years. And when I go home, I’d like to just put my feet up and not have to think about it,” Chaffins said.
Chaffins started coaching at RUHS during the 1994-1995 season for boys volleyball, coaching for 12 years before switching over to girls volleyball in 2001 which he continued to do until he resigned at the end of the 2024-2025 season. During his coaching career at RUHS, Chaffins has worked hard to build and maintain the volleyball teams into the championship winning team it is today.
“There’s a lot of behind the scenes stuff of running a program, and specifically running a top 20 national program. There’s a lot of setting up tournaments, uniforms [and] scheduling,” Chaffins said.
Over his career, Chaffins and his teams have accomplished many feats that put RUHS volleyball on the map. Beating Mira Costa during his fourth year as the boys volleyball coach in 1998 for the first time in 19 years followed by two more victories against them was just one of Chaffin’s accomplishments as a coach.
“In 2006 we beat the number one team in the country on live nationwide TV who happened to be Mira Costa. We won division one, the highest division championship, and five years earlier, we were 13th in the league. So to do that in five years, that’s my number one most special win. Because it took a group to beat the number one team in the country, and live TV, who happened to be Mira Costa,” Chaffins said.
Along with that he also helped coach the girls team to win back-to-back state championships in 2014 and 2015. His success as a coach is recognized from winning CIF Coach Of the Year four times, Max Prep Coach of the Year in 2015, Prep Volleyball High School Coach of the Year, and Southern California Volleyball Report Coach of the year in 2012. But Chaffins holds the modest position that the team’s success doesn’t just fall on him as a coach.
“I laid the foundation. Anybody who thinks that it’s just because of the coach, they’re a fool. A coach is irrelevant if you don’t have great players that are hungry and selfless, it doesn’t matter,” Chaffins said.
While Chaffins can hold that belief all he wants, his RUHS girls volleyball players know how big of a role he has played in building the team. Elizabeth Cohen, ex-player 3 year varsity player under Chaffins and current Education Specialist at RUHS, played for Chaffins during her first years as the girls coach.
“He really turned the program around and made it what it was, and made it legit. He knew what he was doing,” Cohen said.
Chaffin’s passion for volleyball did not start by coaching at RUHS in 1994 but when he was a student at Redondo. In fact, his desire to be a coach did not even start with volleyball.
“I read a book when I was a sophomore here at Redondo [titled], ‘They call me coach.’ [I thought] I’m gonna be a coach. I’m gonna be a basketball coach, like John Wooden. But then my volleyball senior year, I started playing volleyball down the beach, and I got good pretty quick, and I was like, this probably fits my personality more,” Chaffins said.
Chaffins has not just shaped players to play volleyball, but has helped them learn to navigate life but by giving them coaching that can be applied to all facets of life.
“ He made everyone [have this] feel[ing to not] give up. Things might be hard or crappy, you might get dealt a really bad hand, but you can’t like to give up on life and give up on your dreams,” Cohen said.
The determination that Chaffins has instilled in Cohen is something Chaffins has tried to imprint on all his players.
“My favorite part of coaching is seeing players overcome challenges then in the moment, but then what really makes me happy is when they tell me that they used the ‘next play’ in their everyday life,” Chaffin said. “That’s what makes me feel good. Because if they just learned volleyball, then we’re wasting people’s time, because much as I love volleyball it’s really irrelevant in life, but the lessons it can teach us, that’s where the value is.”