Idaho Falls Hires Teacher from Rival School as New Head Coach

  0 Braden Keith | March 19th, 2018 | High School, News

What Andria Harshman is attempting to do wouldn’t even be allowed in most states. In the few where it is, most would be crazy to try it. Harshman, who is currently a math teacher at Canyon Ridge High School, has been hired at the new head volleyball coach at Twin Falls High School. The two schools are rivals. And Harshman plans to continue teaching at Canyon Ridge while coaching at Twin Falls.

“There are some interesting dynamics to that, and we talked about that as a (interview) committee,” Twin Falls athletic director Ted Reynolds said in an interview with MagicValley,.com. “At the same time, I had to find the best volleyball coach for my kids, and she was by far the best candidate.”

Harshman didn’t coach volleyball at Canyon Ridge, but still has many coaching stops on her resume. The Indiana native spend a season as a volunteer assistant at NCAA Division I program Notre Dame and coached high school volleyball from 2002-2007. She then returned to her alma mater, NAIA program Grace College, and was the head coach from 2008-2015. That was followed by 2 years as the head coach at Divsion II Colorado Christian.

Saying she was worn out by the travel-heavy schedule of college volleyball, she and her husband moved to Twin Falls, where she took up a teaching position at Canyon Ridge.

She now takes over a program where BJ Price resigned after 11 seasons as head coach. The team finished the season 37-8 and ranked #5 in the state of Idaho by MaxPreps. That included their first-ever trip to the Idaho Class 4A State Championship match. After losing 3-0 to Skyview in the semi-finals of the double elimination tournament, they beat Burley 3-1 to get a second crack at Skyview. The outcome was no different, with Twin Falls finishing as the state runner-up: the best placing in program history. The team graduates 5 seniors, including University of Utah-bound middle blocker Kennedi Evans, who was the three-time Great Basin Conference Player of the Year.

The two schools are located just 2.7 miles apart by car.

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About Braden Keith

Braden Keith

Braden Keith is the Editor-in-Chief and co-founder of VolleyMob.com. Braden's first foray into sports journalism came in 2010, when he launched a swimming website called The Swimmers' Circle. Two years later, he joined SwimSwam.com as a co-founder. Long huge fans of volleyball, when Braden and the SwimSwam partners sought an opportunity to …

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