"The great aim of education is not knowledge, but action."
6-foot-3 Jim Palilonis sits in his office beneath the quote written across the top of a white board. Though the 20-year veteran coach seems tall, even while sitting, his height is considered short for a volleyball player.
“There are only 30 Division I teams in the country, and the level that these guys are playing at—we’ve got guys that are 6 feet tall jumping forty-inch verticals,” Coach Palilonis says. “We’ve got guys that are 6-foot-9.”
Coach Palilonis is tasked with leading NKU’s first-ever men’s volleyball program. Volleyball is one of the fastest-growing men’s sports in the country, with NKU being one of three Division I programs created in the last year. The Norse will compete in the Midwestern Intercollegiate Volleyball Association (MIVA), one of the strongest conferences in the United States that includes highly competitive programs like Ohio State University and Ball State University. Palilonis has nearly 20 years' experience competing as a coach in the MIVA, serving three years as an assistant coach at Purdue Fort Wayne and 17 years at Ball State.
After graduating from Ball State with a degree in secondary education, Palilonis went on to teach middle school social studies in the southside of Chicago. While teaching seventh and eighth grade at Chicago Public Schools, Palilonis volunteered to coach the boys’ volleyball team—while also running a high school boys’ volleyball program down the road and coaching a middle school girls’ volleyball team.
Once he caught the coaching bug, he joined the Ball State men’s volleyball staff as an assistant coach and never looked back.
“Everybody says you’ll change your profession two or three times over the course of your career, and I always say as much as I love volleyball, I didn’t go to school to be a volleyball coach,” says Palilonis. “I went to school for education, to be a teacher.”
For Palilonis, one of the most attractive aspects of spearheading NKU’s program is establishing the culture. To cultivate what Palilonis wants to build with this team, he says the players need to have two things: gratitude and grit.
“You have to have gratitude that this exists,” Palilonis says. “We’ve got to be thankful, and we have to give each other grace. We have to understand that not everything is going to be perfect right from the jump, we’re all figuring each other out and establishing this culture. The grit is like the intangible things that you can’t teach these guys—the energy, the attitude, the effort, the belief—all of those things play into the grit component. We can coach you up on the court, but if you don’t come in with the right attitude or the right belief—your direction is going to be greatly determined by those kinds of things.”
In a normal recruiting year, a coach would be looking for two, maybe three or four, players to replace those who graduated, but since NKU is starting its program from scratch, Palilonis is bringing in 18 brand-new, shiny players. Some of the recruits are transfers with experience from other universities who Palilonis hopes will challenge the rest of the freshmen-heavy team and give them the space to develop off of each other.
“I feel good about the guys that we have coming in as far as their talent level and their ability to build with that down the line,” he says. “Even though it is a brand-new program, I think there's enough experience and enough talent where they can develop and grow in this first year and challenge each other to get better. We have a good core group of incoming freshmen that if they stay and develop, I think they could be contending in the top of this conference in three to four years easily.”
After hearing feedback and excitement from the community, Palilonis is hoping to see a strong fan turnout at the team’s home games.
“I think it’s a build-it-and-they-will-come type of situation,” he says. “When you see some of the stuff these guys do—the size, the speed, the ability and the physicality—it’s pretty wild. So, it’s something that people just end up gravitating towards. Having the bigger arena is also something that’s marketable because when you have bigger teams that are coming in, you might not realize how many people might come to this. Cincinnati is very big with men’s volleyball and it’s only growing.”
The Norse men’s volleyball team’s first competitive season will begin in January 2026. For updates on the team’s schedule, visit the NKU Norse Athletics website.
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