BLOOMFIELD, NJ — It’s no secret that Bloomfield is a big sports town. Football, wrestling, basketball, baseball, softball, and track and field have all had their share of success in the past few decades at Bloomfield High School.
But for close to 20 years, the sport that has been the most successful has been volleyball.
And that success can be traced to the leadership and guidance of Louis Stevens, the head coach for both the boys and girls volleyball programs since 2005.
Under Stevens, both programs have achieved numerous championships on the conference and county levels. Stevens attained his 500th career victory, boys and girls combined, during the girls season last fall.
In all, Stevens has won 522 boys and girls matches combined in his BHS career. He has won 189 matches on the girls side and 333 matches on the boys side. The boys volleyball season is in the spring.
Stevens led the girls program to Super Essex Conference titles in 2014, 2015 and 2017, and a runner-up finish in the Essex County Tournament in 2008.
His boys teams have been simply remarkable. They have won six ECT championships in 2006, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2016 and 2019, and have been ECT runner-up four other times in 2017, 2018, 2002 and this past spring. The Bengals won the SEC title for four straight seasons from 2016 to 2019, including going undefeated in the SEC in 2017 and 2018. They were also state sectional tournament runner-up twice in 2019 and this past season, when they finished 17-9.
Stevens recalls becoming the boys volleyball coach in the spring 2005. He had been a girls coach at other school districts, but was excited to take over the BHS program that started just a few years prior, in 1999.
“I was excited,” Stevens said. “I was coaching girls for many years. It was my first opportunity to coach a formal boys team. I was excited because, as a player, I had to work really hard to make the most of my limited stature. I knew that we can be pretty successful, if we can get kids who were excited about the sport of volleyball and athletic enough. I knew that I could teach them to play a certain style of volleyball based on athleticism.”
In his first season, the boys had a decent year. Then, in the following fall, Stevens was named the BHS girls head coach. In the following spring in 2006, the boys returned a strong group and won the ECT title, before finishing with a 22-6 record.
The boys program had four head coaches in the first six years. But Stevens has brought stability, serving as head coach for the past 19 seasons.
“I love volleyball. It’s my favorite sport,” he said.
Stevens grew up in Brooklyn, N.Y. Ironically, it wasn’t at a sports camp that he first learned volleyball. He learned it in middle school while he was at a performance arts camp as a violinist.
At Midwood High School in Brooklyn, Stevens was a soccer player for three years and a swimmer for all four years. In both sports, he was a captain of those teams. In his senior year in high school in 1987, volleyball was started in the New York Public School Athletic League. Before then, volleyball was played as a club at high schools that had mostly Asian and European students.
Stevens desperately wanted to become a captain of the volleyball team. Of course, all of the players were on equal footing in terms of experience, but Stevens felt he was the best player on the team.
“I wanted to be captain,” Steven said. “I would have been the only three-sport captain in the school. I didn’t get it, though. I did not get captain because, according to my coach, I was a little too intense. But that’s how I was as a player, because if you look at me, I am not the most physically imposing. I had to play hard. I always played with a chip on my shoulder, because I’m 5-foot-7, 135 pounds. No one is looking at me and saying ‘I know he is a great player.’ That was me in a nutshell.”
Stevens then attended St. Bonaventure University in upstate New York, a school that was famous for alumni and basketball legend Bob Lanier. Stevens considered trying out for the soccer team, having met some soccer players there at freshman orientation. But volleyball was his sport. He introduced himself to the women’s volleyball coach. It was the final year that the team would compete on the Division III level. All of the other sports programs at the school competed in Division I. Stevens served as a team manager and an assistant coach/helper where he would get on the court with the other girls on the team and help them with drills. He said it worked out well, since the girls were the same size as him, but he was more athletic. And that’s how he became a volleyball coach.
During his time at BHS, Stevens always wants his players to love the game and to compete and win.
“I want them to develop a love of the game, and a lot of them still play, so I think that was accomplished,” Stevens said. “Number two, I always want us to be competitive and to win. I always tell them, ‘I want us to have fun, but I think winning is more fun than losing,’ and they all agree. To be competitive in the county and in the state has always been a goal. Every team that I have coached, they made the states (tournament). That is a testament to them and to my assistants as well.”
Stevens, indeed, is grateful for his assistant coaches. Dan Barry, who was on the inaugural 1999 BHS boys volleyball team and graduated in 2002, is the JV girls coach and an assistant coach for the boys, working with the freshmen players. Ronald Gasparri is the JV boys coach and freshman girls coach, and will be the interim BHS girls volleyball head coach this fall. Stevens is taking a one-year hiatus as the BHS girls head coach so that he can follow his daughter’s senior season for the Scotch Plains–Fanwood girls volleyball team. Though he is more accomplished as a football player and wrestler, Gasparri has become a very good volleyball coach in his own right, Stevens said.
Volleyball has always been a family affair for the Stevens family. “I met my wife playing volleyball and we still play with a group of good friends weekly on the grass, playing doubles volleyball,” Stevens said. “My daughter plays volleyball and I was fortunate to be able to coach her last club season and my son plays and will be an incoming freshman at Scotch Plains-Fanwood High School and will be trying out for the volleyball team as well as my club team.”
Many BHS volleyball alumni have reunited. In fact, the alumni game on Friday, June 23, had a strong turnout, with most of the players who are now in their early to mid-30s. Though they are now adults, all of them always refer to Stevens as “coach.”
“They’re not really my age, but now they are adults, so I can speak to them as adults, but they still call me ‘coach.’ I say, ‘you guys can call me Louis’ and they say, ‘no, no, you are coach.’ These kids work their butts off, whether they played for me for four years or for one year, they all worked hard, and that’s the only reason why I have been successful. They are the reason why we’ve won six county championships and been to 10 county championships.”
Longtime BHS athletic director Steven Jenkins also appreciates what Stevens had done for all these years, continuing the Bengals pride.
“Coach has developed a program for both boys and girls volleyball that are consistently outstanding,” Jenkins said. “The width and breadth of his knowledge of the sport are unmatched.”
But if you ask Stevens if there is one major highlight or memory he’s had at BHS, he will always cite the hard work of his players during his tenure.
“For both girls and boys, I appreciated and I still appreciate how hard these kids work for us to become competitive,” Stevens said. “Even this year, we had a few kids playing club volleyball; but relative to a lot of the schools that we faced, we are still much less [experienced] than other schools. For us to be competitive, for us to win matches against teams that are even more athletic than us or have more club players than us, we really do work hard. The kids work hard, and I appreciate how hard they work.”
Bloomfield HS head coach Louis Stevens’ love of volleyball is contagious added by Joe Ragozzino on
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