A five-year member (one redshirt year) of the men’s volleyball team at national power University of Hawai’i, Brennon Dyer joined the NJIT coaching staff as an assistant to new head coach Danny Goncalves in Fall 2014.
Born and raised in California (Santa Barbara), Dyer was most recently coaching at Santa Barbara City College, a two-year program where the head coach was former NJIT opponent and Harvard star Matt Jones.
Between college and embarking on his career as a coach, Dyer played professionally in the top league in Austria in 2011 and 2012.
Dyer’s tree of coaching mentors includes some of the top names in the sport, starting with volleyball Hall of Famer Carl McGown, a two-time National Coach of the Year for Brigham Young University. McGown, father of current BYU coach Chris McGown, has coached for the United States in seven different Olympic Games. The elder McGown created the “Gold Medal Squared” coaching technique and Dyer has applied it in his own coaching career.
At Hawai’i, Dyer was coached by Mike Wilton, Warrior head coach from 1993 to 2009; Dan Fisher, current women’s head coach at Pitt and former associate men’s coach at Hawai’I; Charlie Wade men's volleyball head coach at Hawai'i; Jeff Hall the head coach of women's beach volleyball at Hawai'i and, Robyn Santos, head coach of women's volleyball at Hawai'i who was a former All-American setter with the Hawaii women’s volleyball team who went on to play for the United States in the 2008 Olympics and was “best setter” in the 2001 FIVB World Grand Prix.
A 2011 graduate of the University of Hawai’i at Manoa, Dyer has coached the sport in his native California, in Hawai’i and in Austria.
Although Dyer will be coaching on the East Coast for the first time, he is not altogether unfamiliar with NJIT. Like Highlanders head coach Danny Goncalves, who competed against NJIT while in college at the University of New Haven, Dyer, too, faced the Highlanders.
On March 20 and March 21, 2009, NJIT visited Hawai’i for two matches, both of which were 3-0 wins for the home team. On the first night, Dyer came off the bench and notched 10 kills in just two sets to finish second on his team in kills and made just two errors on 18 swings for a .444 hitting percentage. The next night, he started and again played only two of the three sets, but shared match-high honors with 10 kills. He also served one of his team’s 7 aces.
Updated June 2017
