John Dunning is 73 years old and retired from a collegiate volleyball coaching career that was equal parts unlikely and beyond remarkable. He takes none of it for granted and is especially appreciative of his wife, Julie, as they celebrate their 50th wedding anniversary today.
 
“She is a gem, an amazing person,” Dunning said. “A lot of what’s happened is because of her, there’s no doubt about that.”
 
That would include her contribution to him being Pacific’s 2024 entry into the West Coast Conference Hall of Honor.
 
“I was there for 16 years . . . I loved my time at Pacific,” said Dunning who will be celebrated along with eight other honorees on March 9 during the Credit Union 1 WCC Basketball Championship in Las Vegas. “For me, Pacific has always been just like a family. I loved the coaches I worked with. I loved just being at the school. To be honored in conjunction with the university has been wonderful.”
 
Dunning is the most successful coach Pacific has ever known. From 1985 through 2000, he compiled a win-loss record of 437-102, which represents not only the most victories in any sport by a Pacific coach but also the best winning percentage (.811).
 
He guided the Tigers to 16 consecutive NCAA Tournament appearances, coached 16 All-Americans and two Olympians. And in his first two seasons, he led Pacific to national championships — still the only two in any sport in school history.
 
“He just kind of knew how to win games,” understated Elaina Oden, centerpiece as a freshman and sophomore on those back-to-back NCAA championship squads in 1986 and ’87, who went on to play in two Olympics, winning a gold medal with the U.S. team at the 1992 Barcelona Games.
 
Barely a decade before those collegiate championship seasons, Dunning was a math teacher and basketball coach at Fremont High School in the San Jose suburb of Sunnyvale. Then 17-year-old Crystal Jacobs Gocka walked into his classroom and posed a question that changed his life:
 
“She asked if I would coach the volleyball team,” he recalled. “I told her I’ve never really touched a volleyball or seen the sport, so I don’t know. She was nice about it.” 
 
The team had no coach and Jacobs already had been turned down by three other teachers. “I was terrified. I ended up going with friends,” she said. “I think he thought at first it was a joke.”
 
But Dunning took the job, then tried to figure out how to coach the sport. 
 
“He knew absolutely nothing. He gave us that disclaimer — I have no idea what I’m doing,” Jacobs said. “But once he jumped in, man, he bought books, did everything he could do.”
 
His later success, Jacobs said, was no accident. “You could see that trajectory by how focused he was. He was destined for this.”
 
Dunning credits the late Roger Edwards, a fellow math teacher, as being a key to his volleyball education. Edwards was the school’s water polo coach but played volleyball in college. “He was the primary person who taught me,” said Dunning, who even joined a team with Edwards to get experience playing the game. 
 
In the early days of high school girls’ athletics, in the wake of Title IX passage, Dunning’s teams compiled a record of 283-32, won six CIF Central Coast Section titles and a California state championship in 1980. In the meantime, he founded Bay Club, a powerhouse USA Volleyball junior program, guiding their 17-and-under team to a national championship in 1984.
 
He continued to expand his knowledge of the game, at one point trekking to Stockton to attend a clinic hosted by Tigers’ coach Terry Liskevych, whose Pacific teams advanced to five Final Fours in his nine seasons. Because the camp began at 9 a.m., Dunning made the 81-mile drive the night before and slept in his camper pickup truck.
 
“John was just a consummate student of the game,” Liskevych said. "He always was inquisitive about what we were doing. I got to know how he was increasing his knowledge of the game.”
 
The two became friends and Dunning eventually began to work Liskevych’s clinics. When Liskevych accepted the job as U.S. National Team coach, the candidates for the opening at Pacific included Dunning and some very qualified people. Dunning wasn’t sure he measured up, even with Liskevych in his corner.
 
“Why would I get a job going from high school to college, let alone a Final Four program? Crazy,” he said. “I went and interviewed and I was kind of (thinking) I don’t think I should do this, I’m too inexperienced. That kind of overwhelmed me for a little while.”
 
But just as he was preparing to say no, his wife provided some clarity.
 
“You’ve grown in your volleyball world to running a club, to coaching high school, to teaching 175 math students a day and running summer camps, and you have two children now,” Julie told him. “You need to make your hobby your job or you need to quit your hobby because you don’t have time for your family now.”
 
Dunning realized she was right. “So, I made my hobby my job and that changed our lives, for sure.”
 
While Julie provided the final push, Dunning is forever grateful to Liskevych. “A lot of the reason I got that job was because of him,” he said. “It’s just lucky that I had the chance to go to a clinic at Pacific and got the chance to know him. How lucky can you get? And I realize that.”
 
Dunning inherited a talented roster at Pacific and added a few recruits, including Oden, a 6-foot-1 middle blocker from Orange County, who went on to become a three-time All-American. 
 
Signing with Pacific was a leap of faith, Oden acknowledged, “because he was unknown. A lot of people were shocked.” But Oden said there was something about Dunning that intrigued her, including the notion that “he knows something I don’t know and I kind of want to know what he knows.”
 
Oden was impressed with Dunning’s technical understanding and ability to strategize. But she said his influence on her career was much greater than that.
 
“I came out of high school in this really intense program and I was completely burned out.” she said. “Playing under him kind of made me love volleyball again. The way he presented the game, the way we practiced, it was all very comfortable and logical and competitive and successful. It made volleyball fun. 
 
“If I had stayed in a program like I was in, there’s no way I would have made it to the Olympics.”
 
The Tigers roared through those first two seasons, posting a combined record of 75-6 with a pair of NCAA titles. They reached the national finals again in 1990.
 
Dunning left for Stanford in 2000, a decision he called “impossible,” given his affection for Pacific. He continued to excel, winning three more NCAA titles before retiring in 2016 with an overall record of 888-185.
 
He was inducted into the Pacific Athletics Hall of Fame in 2007, the American Volleyball Coaches Association Hall of Fame in 2011 and the San Jose Sports Hall of Fame in 2019.
 
Dunning, who lives in Lodi and now does part-time work at Pacific as a coaching mentor, said he relied on two principles throughout his career: Be a good listener and coach to live, not to win.
 
He came to believe it was imperative for his athletes “to know you understand their academic life and care about it and having them know beyond college you want to be part of their life, if that’s what they want.”
 
Along with his ability to break down the game technically and teach it, Liskevych said, Dunning was successful because he connected with his athletes in a genuine fashion.
 
“That’s the key right there for him as one of the great college coaches,” Liskevych said. “It’s like the Yin and the Yang. He’s got that methodical approach, yet he’s very personable, very approachable.”