As soon as Fran Flory steps into the University High gym, all eyes are on her.
Every parent, even the ones she’s never met, know her by name, and groups of visiting junior varsity players stare at her like a celebrity. She casually walks around the stands greeting the other parents in her LSU warm-up suit, which she didn’t have time to change out of after coming straight from coaching Tiger volleyball practice.
She’s the purple and gold elephant in the room.
As Fran puts it, her daughter Lindsay Flory, a senior on the U-High volleyball team, will forever be, “Flory’s child.” It’s the main reason why she tried for years to push her daughter away from the sport she’s made her entire life.
“I told her, ‘People will think that you’re privileged because of that, and I don’t ever want you to think of that as a negative,’” Fran said. “‘Understand the trials and tribulations of the judgment you’re going to face because you are who you are. That isn’t your choice, but it is your choice because you’re choosing this sport.’”
But like many teenagers, Lindsay didn’t listen to her mother.
“Anything that wasn’t volleyball, she had me playing,” Lindsay said. “I said, ‘Mom, I don’t like any of these sports. I like volleyball. Let me play volleyball.’”
Lindsay recently was named the Preseason NOLA.com | The Times-Picayune All-Baton Rouge Area Small Schools Volleyball Player of the Year as a setter for U-High — a position she reluctantly switched to at her mother’s urging.
‘You look like your mom’
Fran eventually finds her seat in the middle of a group of fellow U-High parents who happily greet her just before the Cubs take on Assumption in a pre-district match.
Once the match starts, Lindsay quickly assumes her role as the vocal leader of the team — a demeanor she said she gets from her mother. She constantly shifts around the court between points, congratulating her teammates, talking strategy with U-High coach Bonita Johnson and arguing previous calls with the referees.
Johnson described Lindsay as looking just like her father, but her long build is unmistakably the mark of her mother.
“Once a college coach that we’ve known forever walked up to me and said, ‘You look like your mom yelling at that ref,’” Lindsay said. “I guess I get it from her — and my dad because he yells at refs, too. It’s a family thing.”
And on any other day, Fran would be doing the same, but once she steps into the U-High gym to see her daughter play, that’s all she’s there to do.
from the beginning
It’s nearly impossible to miss Fran’s intensity on the court. After all, this is the woman who never sits during a match, who constantly alternates between yelling at the referees and her players — the same woman who once pushed through contractions when she went into labor before a match with Louisville while coaching at Kentucky.
“Your first baby doesn’t come real fast, so I knew I was probably safe,” Fran quipped. “My team was up 2-0 and ended up losing in five. I was more frustrated with my team that we couldn’t pull it out than I was about being in labor in the middle of the match.”
Prior to the match, Fran revealed her secret only to her husband, mother and her assistant coaches. Of course, it wasn’t long before Kathy DeBoer, then-Senior associate athletics director at Kentucky and current executive director of the American Volleyball Coaches Association, found out.
“She was mad we lost,” Fran said of she and DeBoer’s conversation after the match. “She said, ‘So the rumor is that you’re in labor, and that damn well better be right.’”
It was. The next morning, Lindsay was born.
The next week, Fran and her husband packed up the car, baby and all, for a road match in Tennessee. It would become Lindsay’s first volleyball game, as Fran rotated between calming the newborn and coaching the Wildcats.
Lindsay said she loves telling the story of how her life quite literally revolved around volleyball from birth.
“It’s an advantage for me,” Lindsay said. “I’ve just always been around the game, and I get to watch it all the time. I think that comes with a better understanding of the game. That would’ve only happened if I had been around it my whole life.”
‘Bad voodoo’
Even when Fran is at her daughter’s matches, she can’t seem to escape the responsibilities of a college coach. Her phone rings, forcing her to step outside during one of the sets.
It’s particularly frustrating because Fran already doesn’t make as many matches as she’d like because of practice schedules and road trips with LSU.
It doesn’t bother Lindsay, though. In fact, it comes with benefits.
“Apparently, I play better when she’s not [at the games],” Lindsay said with a laugh. “She’s bad voodoo.”
It isn’t that her mother openly criticizes her — it’s just an anomaly neither of them can explain.
Fran said she tries to separate her coaching life from her home life. If Lindsay asks for advice on her game, she’ll gladly oblige, but for the most part, the mother and daughter try to leave the coaching up to Johnson.
Resident Celebrity
Back on the court, the Cubs force a fifth set in the match as the two teams have gone back and forth all night. Lindsay is the U-High representative when talking to the referees between sets.
Fran intently looks on as her daughter records a block to push the Cubs within a few points of a come-from-behind win against Assumption.
When U-High finally gets the win, Fran gives a small applause with the rest of the parents, but still maintains her calm demeanor.
“I think she played pretty well,” Fran said. “She did some good things. She served really well.”
Before Lindsay is even able to change out of her uniform in the locker room, several Assumption players are lined up to snap a picture with LSU’s coach.
“It’s really weird,” Lindsay said. “I still can’t get over when people ask me to take pictures of them and my mom. I’m like, ‘You want to take a picture with my mom?’”
When the match ends
Lindsay said she and her mother decided early on that the only way the two would ever meet on a collegiate court was on opposing benches.
Fran said she’s fine with that, as long as Lindsay is somewhere she wants to be. Fran said she’s remained largely uninvolved with her daughter’s recruitment process because she doesn’t want to push her anywhere she might not want to go. Instead, LSU associate head coach Jill Lytle Wilson has been helping Lindsay with her decision.
Lindsay said she would love to play for coach Flory — if it weren’t for the small fact that she’s also her mother.
Fran said she’ll give Lindsay advice on what the coaching staff will be like for whatever school she picks, but other than that, she wants her to make her own decisions.
“As much as I love my kids, I want them to go away and grow up and become who they want to become, where they want to be,” Fran said. “I recruit kids into that at LSU, and I want to open those doors for my kids as well.”