Building Grit in Big Ten Volleyball with Eddie Ramirez

Eddie Ramirez took an unconventional route into strength and conditioning. He spent his teenage years and early twenties as a competitive breakdancer before a friend showed him that college strength coaching was even a career path. Internships at Syracuse and Texas followed, and by the time he wrapped his stint with Texas football in 2019, he knew this was what he wanted to do for good.Now in his fourth year at Indiana University, Ramirez works with volleyball, men's and women's swimming and diving, and men's golf. Volleyball has been his primary focus, and he's been direct with his athletes from day one. Competing with programs like Wisconsin, Purdue, and Nebraska, teams that lean on deep talent pools, meant Indiana needed something else to close the gap. Ramirez calls it grit, and he builds it by refusing to sugarcoat hard training while staying honest with his athletes about his own tough stretches.That same directness shapes how he works with the program's international athletes. Rather than expecting them to adjust to a new sport system and a new country on the same timeline as everyone else, Ramirez has taught himself greetings and coaching cues in his athletes' native languages, including Russian and Turkish, to shorten the adjustment period and build trust early.Key Takeaways- Competing with programs that out-talent you requires a deliberate culture decision, not just harder workouts. Ramirez tells his volleyball team upfront that training will be uncomfortable, and backs it up by being vulnerable about his own hard moments.- International athletes are managing two adjustments at once: a new training system and a new country. Ramirez shortens that gap by learning basic phrases and coaching cues in their language.- Skill progression should be athlete-paced, not calendar-paced. If a full clean takes a year to teach safely, that's the timeline he uses.- His own path into the field was nontraditional. Five years as a competitive breakdancer came before he even knew college strength and conditioning existed as a job.- He's actively working to close a skill gap this year: getting sharper with GPS and data tracking through Catapult.Quote Block"It's not because I hate you guys or think you're out of shape. We've got to have a little extra when we're competing against these big-name teams."- Eddie Ramirez, Assistant Strength and Conditioning Coach, Indiana University