Longtime Long Beach State men’s volleyball coach Alan Knipe was recently announced as an upcoming inductee into the AVCA Hall of Fame, one of the highest honors available to a coach in the sport. The induction ceremony will take place on Dec. 18 in Kansas City, Missouri at the AVCA’s Convention, centered as it is each year around the NCAA Women’s Volleyball Final Four.
“It’s quite an honor,” said Knipe. “When any of these kind of things happen you kinda have to slow down and think about it. You think, this happens for coaches who’ve been coaching a long time and you realize you have been. It’s special.”
Knipe was recently inducted into the Long Beach Century Club’s Hall of Fame, the highest honor available to coaches or athletes in the city, and that honor coupled with this led him to joke, “Are people telling me something about it being time?”
Knipe will join fellow Long Beach State coaching legend Brian Gimmillaro, his longtime assistant coach Debbie Green, and Dixie Grimmett as LBSU members in the AVCA Hall of Fame.
Knipe’s accomplishments put him right up at the top of the LBSU coaching list alongside Gimmillaro (who won three NCAA titles and took the 49ers to eight Final Fours).
Knipe has been a part of all four LBSU men’s volleyball national titles, first as a player in 1991, and then as the coach of the 2018, 2019, and 2025 NCAA championship teams. He also coached the USA Olympic team for the 2012 Olympic cycle from 2009-2012, stepping away from coaching the Beach for that stretch.
His coaching accolades include three AVCA National Collegiate Coach of the Year awards, coaching seven National Players of the Year, and helping to produce seven Olympians for the USA team.
Knipe is famously a coach who eschews praise and credit, and has mastered the art of coach speak, as well as the finer art of actually buying into and embodying the idea of taking things one practice at a time. He doesn’t discuss rankings, doesn’t like award chatter, and is not prone to looking backwards. Even so, he acknowledged that this was the type of honor that gives him pause.
“I can put it in context,” he said. “I see it as something way bigger than me. I really want it to tell the story of what we’ve been able to do with Long Beach State men’s volleyball, what our program has accomplished but really where we’ve come from and how far we’ve come from those early few years when everything was a struggle. In this world of college athletics it’s so difficult for non-football schools to have a lot of success.”
Knipe credited school administration, boosters, and the Long Beach community for creating the soil that his program’s success has grown from, pointing out that without the ability to host Final Fours and other big events, things could look different.
“I’ve been the head coach and had oversight, but it’s taken all of that to get it where it is right now,” he said. “That’s what I want to celebrate is that story, more than a plaque to put up on the wall.”
Knipe, like Gimmillaro, has also coached at Long Beach State with a bit of a pirate flag mentality. It’s not a secret to anyone involved in mid-major college sports that the NCAA is not exactly rooting for their success.
“I take a lot of pride in the Long Beach aspect, yeah,” said Knipe. “In the years that we had good teams and maybe we made the Finals and maybe we didn’t, there’s a lot of people throughout the NCAA where, that’s where they want us to be. Long Beach is supposed to be good, but not sit on top. That’s a reality and it is a little bit of a driving force.”
Knipe remembers that feeling from winning as a player in 1991, and said that’s been a driving force for him as far as why he’s coaching, and why he’s chosen his alma mater.
“That moment in time, those 20 minutes after the match, is euphoric and magical,” he said. “I remember feeling how incredible that felt and as time went on, thinking Long Beach can do this. We weren’t that special, this could be replicated again. And when Ray (Ratelle) asked me to come back and coach that’s what I thought about. I want the players at Long Beach State to go through this emotion, to play and win. I want to do this more than once, I want to always be around it. My dad used to tell me you’re not going to win it if you’re not in it, so just be in it a lot. I take a lot of pride in the fact that there all the reasons people think we shouldn’t be able to do it. We are Long Beach, and we will.
“In this profession you have to love what you do, you have to love the people you do it with. For me, if it was just about money, I should have done something different anyways. I always wanted it to be Long Beach.”
If Knipe sounds a little more reflective, it’s not necessarily because he’s on the verge of retirement, although he acknowledged he’s got more years behind him than ahead.
“It’s a dream job and a unique situation,” he said. “I don’t know what the timetable holds for me and college sports. I just know that I have quite a bit to offer volleyball wise, coaching wise, and leadership and mentoring wise. I’m sure there will be a day when I want to do something else, but I don’t know what that looks like. You always wonder as things change. There’s another chapter out there somewhere, but I don’t know what it is or when it is. I feel like I’ve left everything that I could every year in our program, and when that changes then it’ll be time.”
