UNC Bears volleyball has busy offseason  ...Saudi Arabia

The UNC volleyball team’s fall season ended a little more than a month ago, and the Bears are already moving on toward 2026

In a rare occurrence, two freshmen will join UNC this month with the start of the spring semester. The program also said good-bye to associate head coach Pi’i Aiu, who announced his retirement in December.

Freshmen Gillian Walton and Riley Taylor were among six players to sign for 2026, the program announced in November. Walton and Taylor are expected to be on campus for the start of the spring semester Monday with both athletes opting to graduate a semester early from high school.

UNC has since announced the signing of three transfer students in setter Emily Bruss, middle blocker Summer Snead and outside hitter Kylie Cackovic.

Walton was an outside hitter, defensive specialist and opposite hitter at Overland Park High School in Overland Park, Kansas. Taylor was a right-side outside hitter at Green Level High School in Apex, North Carolina.

After starting their nonconference season with a 3-9 record, the Bears turned things around during the Big Sky Conference season.

UNC won the conference tournament title on its home court, and advanced to the NCAA Tournament. UNC then pushed nationally ranked Creighton to five sets in a first-round match on the Bluejays’ home floor in Omaha, Nebraska.

The match was the final one for Aiu, who’d been with Oates for seven years.

Aiu came to UNC before the 2019 season after 12 years at the University of Colorado in Boulder. He was promoted to associate head coach in January 2020, and was really a right-hand man for Oates.

She said this week the search for a successor will soon begin. Oates was aware of Aiu’s plans to retire long before the end of the season. She said she heard from several people on her coaching connection with Aiu as news of his retirement became public.

“I don’t know that I took that for granted,” Oates said of Aiu as a coaching colleague. “It is maybe true how much success the two of us had together in the last seven years.”

Oates said she previously had the same camaraderie with assistants Jenny Glenn and Tom Hunter, both of whom spent close to a decade in the program.

In the last seven years, UNC’s record is 150-64 with four Big Sky Conference Tournament titles leading to four NCAA Tournament appearances. In the same span, UNC also won a Big Sky Conference regular-season championship (2024). Also in 2024, UNC qualified for the National Invitational Volleyball Championship after a runner-up finish at the Big Sky tournament.

“It just shows you how valuable assistant coaches are,” Oates said. “I mean, they are doing a bulk of the recruiting and their training, and they create our culture as much as a head coach does.”

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