Legendary volleyball coach Rocky Ciarelli remembered as community leader

The Orange County volleyball community has lost a titan, as Rocky Ciarelli died unexpectedly on Tuesday. He was 66.

Ciarelli suffered a heart attack during a round of golf with friends at Mile Square Golf Course in Fountain Valley, his family said.

A longtime fixture in the local volleyball scene, Ciarelli coached high school volleyball for 32 years. He spent 24 years at Huntington Beach (1985 to 2008), which he graduated from in 1974 and went on to teach social studies. Ciarelli also coached at Edison from 1982 to 1984.

After taking some time away from the game, Ciarelli returned to the bench in 2015 to head the Newport Harbor boys’ volleyball program, where he spent five seasons and had the chance to coach his nephew, Dayne Chalmers, who is currently an outside hitter at UC Santa Barbara.

At Huntington Beach, Ciarelli won back-to-back CIF Southern Section Division I boys’ volleyball championships in 1993 and 1994. He then led the Huntington Beach girls’ volleyball team to the CIF Division IIAA and the CIF State Division II titles in 1996.

It was a victorious swan song for Ciarelli at Newport Harbor, as the Sailors captured the CIF Division 1 and the CIF State Division I boys’ volleyball championships in 2019.

Tony Ciarelli, the son and youngest of two children raised by Rocky and his wife Cammy, viewed his father as a community leader, adding that his community was volleyball.

“There is a massive coaching tree around my dad, who he influenced, because he was a community leader,” said Tony, who was named national player of the year by the American Volleyball Coaches Assn. while at USC in 2012. “He was the guy who allowed people to be his assistant coaches and taught them how to love the game and taught them how to love coaching. He was an influencer of men and women alike, and there’s an insane number of people who touched him in the volleyball world.”

Huntington Beach High has seen three generations of the Ciarelli family walk through its doors. The boys’ and girls’ volleyball programs at the school are currently helmed by Craig Pazanti, who played for Ciarelli from 1986 to 1989.

“He was my coach, he was my mentor, he was my boss, he was my friend,” Pazanti said. “I only do what I do because of him, as far as my job, volleyball, the passion that I have for it. Yesterday was rough. He was the life of every party he was at.”

Pazanti said a plan is in the works to honor Ciarelli throughout the boys’ volleyball season, possibly via a patch on the Oilers’ jerseys.

“The program that we know today is there because of him,” Pazanti added. “I’m just doing my best to keep it going. He just made Huntington Beach volleyball a family, and that was kind of the whole idea. When you left, you were a part of something.”

Rocky and Cammy married in 1987, and his wife, an accomplished volleyball player in her own right, said she was never surprised that her husband could switch gears between the competitive coach and the tender, loving family man.

Cammy said it was the same side of him that she saw when they were alone. His grandchildren were often seen crawling around him after matches in his days at Newport Harbor.

“He’s a big, brown intimidating man, but he’s tender and soft like a teddy bear,” Cammy said. “Everyone is attracted to that. Kids are attracted to that. They don’t look at him like this big, brown intimidating person. Kids see immediately [through] to his heart.”

Cammy added that Rocky placed an emphasis on a common goal of team success.

“Everyone who’s ever been coached by him would say that the depth of the experience of being coached by Rocky is that you exist at a very deep level if you’re on one of his teams,” she said. “There’s no hierarchy of team members. It’s a miracle the way he’s able to do that.”

Family and friends noted that Ciarelli was a big fan of the rock band Grateful Dead. Dan Glenn, who coached with Ciarelli at Edison and then again at Newport Harbor, said he had been listening to their music since learning of Ciarelli’s passing.

Glenn said he remembered Ciarelli first as a teacher and then as the ultimate family man.

“There is some Zen to it and stuff like that,” Glenn said of Ciarelli’s nature. “That’s kind of the magic of it, the patience and the ability to let kids fail, let them have their successes and failures on their own, and not just telling them what to do, and getting them to figure out what to do.

“The thing I love about Rock, and that’s how I always measure a great coach: It’s not how the players feel about them when they’re playing for them. It’s five years down the road. There’s so many people who have reached out to me in the last two days, and he just had an impact on so many people.”

The Ciarelli family would get together on Sundays for dinner. Rocky’s older brother, Tony, who enjoyed a great deal of success as a throws coach in track and field, remarked that the weekly gathering was the last time he saw his brother.

They shared joys and sorrows over those dinners, and they shared similar coaching philosophies.

“It was always whatever it took — time, effort, emotions — trying to get the kids to buy in to understand that it takes that all-in type attitude to be successful because there’s just a lot of competition,” Ciarelli’s brother, Tony, said. “It’s really tough to win, even just on your own abilities, somebody who has a lot of abilities but doesn’t know how to put it together, or a team that doesn’t know how to work together as a team.

“Those are the kinds of things that obviously Rocky, especially, did a great job of getting them to work together as a unit and understand the effort that all of them had to make to be successful.”

Ciarelli is survived by his wife Cammy, brother Tony, sister Paula, daughter Felicia, son Tony and three grandchildren — Camden, Ella and Maia.

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