Longtime travel coach now heads Wildcats program
Destrehan associate head volleyball coach Edward Borgstede has been promoted to the team’s head coaching position, part of a staff restructuring for a program that made positive strides in 2016. Borgstede and Meagan Stock will swap roles as Stock becomes associate head coach, head JV coach and the program’s quality control analyst after serving as the team’s head coach last season. Christie Taliancich remains on as a top assistant after joining the staff last season.
Borgstede will be making his head coaching debut on the prep level in the fall, but he is no stranger to coaching at all after 11 years of coaching at the USA volleyball level.
“I’m really excited and I’m looking forward to it,” said Borgstede. “I hope this is the start of something. We’re bringing back most of last year’s team. The athletes are there, now it’s up to me to get them over the hump.”
Borgstede is a non-school faculty coach at Destrehan who would not have been eligible to take on the head coaching job in past years. But because of a recent rule passed by the LHSAA that allows non-faculty members to be hired as head coach, the Wildcats job was in play for the veteran coach.
“Because it was never really a reality for me, it wasn’t something I spent too much time thinking about,” Borgstede said. “But I love to do this. I cannot thank the administration, principal Stephen Weber, assistant principal Jack Bryant, and our athletic director Clarence Dupepe’ enough for giving me this opportunity to take Wildcats volleyball to the next level.”
He said it was important to him to keep the coaching staff in place after building what he believes is a solid foundation for success.
“The transition has been very smooth,” Borgstede said. “By keeping the staff together in different roles, it ensures that the program can continue heading in the right direction. We established our mission statement, ‘trust the process,’ and everyone has bought in. We want to change the culture and make volleyball (at Destrehan) relevant like it was in the past.”
The Wildcats finished 14-19 in 2016 under Stock and Borgstede and a young, underclassman-laden team began to show signs of major improvement by midseason after an initial learning curve. The Wildcats will lose two seniors in Abbey Richardson and Tabitha Tabb going into next season, but the majority of rotation players are set to return.
Some of the returning standouts include sophomore Allison Carmichael, who led her team with 703 assists, sophomore Noelle Kelley, who made 363 digs, sophomore Gia Zeringue, who made 207 kills, and freshman Mallory Laumann, who made 200 digs.
“We knew we were a year away,” Borgstede said. “We’ll be so much stronger next year. We have a good incoming class. One good thing is we run the same scheme for both our JV and varsity teams so there’s not as much adjustment once the jump to varsity is made.”
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