PARIS — Probably the most athletic volleyball household?
It might be powerful to not give the nod to the Tillies of France, who’re well-represented at these Paris Olympics, and never simply in males’s volleyball.
Begin with Laurent, the two-time French Olympian who then coached France to the 2021 Tokyo Olympics gold medal. We caught up with him Thursday when he got here to South Paris Area 1 in the course of the USA girls’s observe and visited with Marv Dunphy. Dunphy, a USA assistant, was the longtime coach at Pepperdine and coached the 1988 USA males to Olympics gold. Dunphy and Tillie go method again.
.Laurent, 60, is working for French TV, and so is his brother. Extra on that in a bit.
The France staff that received gold in Tokyo included Tillie’s son, 6-foot-7 Kevin. Kevin, 33, received back-to-back NCAA titles at UC Irvine, the place his coach was USA Olympic coach John Speraw. Kevin has performed professionally since 2013 and is on the French males’s Olympic staff right here.
(UC Irvine aspect notes: Tillie is one in all three former Anteaters taking part in volleyball in Paris. USA center David Smith, 39, performed at UCI from 2004-07. Australian Thomas Hodges, 30, performed at UCI in 2015, and is in these Video games in seaside volleyball with companion Zachary Schubert. And when UCI received the 2012 NCAA title, it beat USC, which featured freshman Micah Christenson, now the USA setter).
The oldest Tillie brother, 36-year-old Kim, performed basketball at Utah. Kim, 6-11, has performed professionally in Europe since 2010 and performed on the French staff that made it to the Rio Olympics.
And little brother, Killian, 26, you may recall, was a freshman at Gonzaga when the Bulldogs made it to the 2017 NCAA Ultimate 4 championship sport towards North Carolina. Killian, 6-9, performed for the NBA’s Memphis Grizzlies from 2020-2022 however accidents have stored him out of the sport for 2 years. He’s making a comeback and his father simply final week went to Las Vegas see him play within the NBA’s summer season league for the Boston Celtics.
Laurent doesn’t, nonetheless, get all of the credit score for the boys. His spouse, the previous Caroline Keulen, was the captain of the Dutch nationwide volleyball staff.
And, extremely, it doesn’t finish there. Laurent’s brother, Patrice, was on the French nationwide water polo staff. On the 1992 Barcelona Olympics, Laurent was taking part in for France in volleyball and Patrice represented their nation in water polo.
Like his brother, Patrice works for French TV, on this case calling Olympics water polo.
