From sandpit to sand court, she's changing volleyball

Newsroom

04-07-2025

Before she was guiding elite volleyball athletes, Colleen Campbell was wrangling toddlers.
Now, as Volleyball New Zealand's high performance manager, she's discovering surprising similarities between the two worlds.
Straight out of high school, Campbell studied early childhood education and went on to manage a string of early learning centres – experience she now sees as comparable to high performance sport.
'They're both unpredictable. Fast paced. To work in them, you need to be present and engaged, a really good problem solver with quick reactions. And where it's really at is time spent with the children, or with the athletes,' she says.
'Their learning environments are about error, mistake, learning. How do we build an understanding of the person and their learning style? What are their needs we have to meet? And it's also around trust and a sense of security and belonging.'
An educator and people developer at heart, Campbell is driving organisational change in the sport she loves.
As well as taking care of the needs of athletes and coaches, Campbell is helping emerging female coaches enter the high performance space and learn on the job, from both their successes and failures.
Antonia Harrison coaches Jay Huggins at a Volleyball NZ beach camp. Photo: Thomas Hamill Photography
Antonia Harrison is one of those women. Returning home from playing and coaching at a US university, Antonia joined Volleyball NZ in 2024 through High Performance Sport New Zealand, and the Women in High Performance Sport Residency Experience programme.
Now the New Zealand A beach volleyball head coach, she says she owes a lot to Campbell, who's built a scaffolding of support around her.
'Colleen's the glue in our sport. Behind the scenes, she does so much for our sport and our people so we can focus on coaching the athletes,' Harrison says. 'Her goal is to leave the sport in a better place, and she's doing that so well.'
In a small, nimble sport that's thinking outside the square, Campbell has also established a women's working group. Groundbreaking in the sport, it's giving women a forum where they can speak openly and feel supported. 'They are the voice of change,' says Campbell, now on the empowerment commission for international volleyball body FIVB.
'You have to think about the little girls out there who, in 20 years' time work for Volleyball New Zealand, and it's a kick-ass environment because of the change that's happening now. If this is good for women, this is going to be good for society.
'Volleyball is a sport that's growing massively, and I feel really privileged to be in the position I'm in.'
Colleen Campbell has a long history in coaching both indoor and beach volleyball. She coached with her husband, international beach volleyball referee Richard Casutt, at junior men's national level before they moved to Adelaide for five years.
There, she coached volleyball in schools, then state and national programmes, learning in the junior high performance environment and attending the beach volleyball junior world championships.
When the couple moved back to Auckland, Campbell coached a senior men's team in the New Zealand club championships for two years.
After Campbell became 'a late mum' eight years ago, she took on a five-hour-a-week job as the performance manager at Volleyball NZ.
'I had a female CE, and it was a very inclusive environment for a mum with a young child. We'd have meetings outside so my daughter could run around in the park,' she says.
Working with coaches around their national camps, Campbell prioritised relationship building, then understanding the challenges and putting in systems and processes around recruitment, athlete selection and planning.
After the interruption of a global pandemic, Campbell's role accelerated. International funding from FIVB enabled Volleyball NZ to invest in beach coaches ahead of the 2022 Commonwealth Games.
Beach volleyballer Meile-Rose Green takes instruction from NZ coaches Craig Seuseu and Jason Lochhead. Photo: Thomas Hamill
After the Tokyo Olympics in 2021, former top Kiwi player Jason Lochhead returned home with a stellar CV coaching international teams to the Olympics, and helped revive New Zealand's beach volleyball programme, now in Tauranga. Craig Seuseu, another Kiwi legend who coached Germany at the 2012 Olympics, is also part of the coaching team.
Now the longest serving employee at Volleyball NZ, Campbell works 32 hours a week. She has the flexibility to work around the needs of her family.
'It's a small organisation with not a lot of resource, so people have to do multiple roles. It can be exhausting, and the big challenge is what are we going to do really well? We can't be everything to everybody all the time,' she says. 'Even though that caring, nurturing side of women makes us feel we have to solve all the problems, all the time, that can be your superpower, but it can be your nemesis too.'
One of the areas Campbell has been most interested in is growing women's coaches in volleyball.
'I was really inquisitive around the data and research around women coaching. We needed more enablers,' she says. 'Then I was super curious around how we retain women in our organisation.'
So Campbell set up a women's working group – focused on recruiting, retaining and rewarding women in the organisation – who meet monthly.
'As a result of those meetings, these women have felt more confident in the organisation, and now have a forum where they can share their stories in a way they feel safe. There's a contextual environment for them. They've created a network,' she says.
The working group are also helping to understand recruitment so shifts can happen for women.
'That's the biggest piece we are gaining clarity on right now,' Campbell says. 'They way we write job descriptions is terrible. Are our values around the jobs they're going to do, and the skill sets they've got, or are they around their personal attributes first and foremost? If we're not a people-focused organisation, then women are going to get lost or they're not going to apply for a position, because it's all about the tasks they'll do.
'So why not create our job descriptions, and that's the last thing they see. Let's not make it 30 bullet points; let's make it five.'
The working group feedback is shared at senior leadership meetings. 'They now have a platform and an opportunity to be heard,' Campbell says.
Kim Smith, a former Black Fern and Volley Fern, was the first woman to take up a Women in High Performance Sport residency experience with Volleyball NZ. A secondary school teacher, Smith's 12-month role at Volleyball NZ started in 2023 as performance coach advisor for women and girls.
'When Kim was part of our organisation, we changed the way we recruited coaches,' Campbell says. 'The first interview was learning about them as a person, then the next meeting was about their coaching credentials and philosophy on how they'd shape the programme.'
Smith's work was innovational. She introduced C.O.D-E F, a mentoring and coach development programme specifically for female coaches aspiring to coach national volleyball teams. Before the residency, Volleyball NZ had just two female coaches – that increased to five at a national level during that year.
'We wanted to make sure this piece of work honoured all the women brave enough to give their voice to research that was able to address what was missing for women,' Campbell says. 'With C.O.D–E F, we wanted to create a bespoke programme designed by women for women but had key principles aligned to what the research was saying was missing.
'What's been significant is that cohort of 13 women stay connected, and they still have a network of support they regularly engage with.'
Volleyball NZ coaching team watch from the sidellines at a beach volleyball tournament. Photo: Thomas Hamill Photography
One of those women, NZ U19 beach volleyball coach Liz Hanna, was then accepted into HPSNZ's Te Hāpaitanga coach development programme.
Antonia Harrison was at the University of North Florida – where she'd played, studied then stayed on to coach for two years – when a conversation with Lochhead encouraged her to return home to work with up-and-coming beach volleyball players.
Campbell asked Lochhead and Seuseu if they'd support Harrison in a two-year residency. 'I'm not the person on the sand, or the coaching expert. It has to be driven by them, and be something they see value in doing, because it's actually real value for her and for the sport,' she says.
Both men saw the value of the opportunity, including boosting the number of top women coaches in the sport.
'Given we're a sport that's truly 50:50 gender in athletes, and super strong at high school level, I think it's hugely important to make sure we have representation across both genders in coaching and leadership,' Seuseu says. 'So having women like Antonia leading the day camps, organising the drills and holding people accountable, is really important.
'It's equally important for the guys to see we have strong women in leadership as well. The boys have completely bought into Antonia's culture and way of doing things. She's ticked every single box around connection with athletes, structure and debriefs. She's managed to command a lot of respect with the guys and the girls.'
Harrison works with just over 20 athletes in the pre-high performance environment. 'I'm loving it. Any day on the beach is a good day,' she says.
She runs weekend camps with her squad, with Lochhead as her assistant. He meets her once a week online, Seuseu meets her once a week on the sand, and they also support her at tournaments around the national tour.
Campbell also plays a major role in Harrison's development. 'Colleen is super caring and super approachable, and she's been a really cool sounding board,' says Harrison. 'No topic is off limits; you can chat on anything.
'She knows a lot about volleyball and she knows people really well and provides great perspective and context. Nothing is ever a burden – she's always asking, 'Where can I help, how can I make an impact?''
To continue her development, Harrison will coach NZ A teams in international competition and attend the beach volleyball world championships in Adelaide later this year, to help determine where her knowledge gaps lie. A major part of the residency experience is giving coaches space to fail and learn, with support around them, so they can transition to high performance.
'She needs to have that real-life experience to do it,' says Campbell. 'I really believe you have to set environments up for people to be successful, and then if they fail, they can get back up because they know the environment is supportive of their development. If we don't expose her to that, she's not going to close that gap of understanding.'
Harrison admitted to Campbell she struggled to recognise her own strengths, questioning whether she was making a meaningful impact on the athletes or if they were progressing enough under her coaching.
'I think the biggest gap is her seeing herself as being the best person to coach at a high performance level,' Campbell says. 'We have a responsibility as a coaching group to nurture and develop that with her, and it can only go at the pace that she's ready for. But we have to be hyper aware of what we're doing and understand what she needs from us.
'Jason is super-invested in Antonia and NZ A, because he knows they're part of the future plan for our programme. We're going to have more teams, so we're going to need more coaches.'
For Lochhead – who's coached in Vanuatu, Canada and the US – working with Campbell has helped bring Volleyball NZ together as a team. 'One of the special things about Colleen is that she's so good at reaching out to each of us individually, setting up meetings and getting chats in with our players. She so good at creating bonds with people, she makes us feel connected,' he says.
'As with every sport there's always going to be drama and bumps in the road. But she's great at having those conversations and being straightforward when you need her to be… to kind of hit people with a hard truth, which can help get through stuff.'
Campbell sees herself as the person who puts all the puzzle pieces together.
'My job is to help support and guide,' she says. 'The coaches do all the work on the sand, and I do work off the sand to build the puzzle.'