LSU head volleyball coach Fran Flory spoke to fellow NCAA Division I female volleyball coaches at the SOAR symposium in January. This was the second time the SOAR symposium was held and the first time it was hosted at the University.
SOAR is a symposium that was created to help Division I female coaches come together and learn how to be better coaches and empower each other.
“SOAR started with one of our former LSU student athletes who played volleyball here that I coached in the late ’80s and early ’90s,” Flory said. “She is now the associate head coach at Texas.”
“SOAR” stands for support, openness, advocacy and renewal. This is only the second year it has been held, but it is already making a big impact for the coaches that have attended.
“It started as an idea to have a mentor-mentee type of situation for women in coaching, and specifically Division I coaching,” Flory said.
Flory has been coaching for 35 years and has a passion for helping other women, whether that be other coaches or the athletes she coaches. SOAR has allowed her to do just that on a large scale.
“I felt like it was important to host to part of it because I’m passionate about women coaching women,” Flory said. “Secondly I thought it was important for us to host to show our student athletes that this is a great pathway and women should support women separately.”
Women at SOAR were able to collaborate with each other and share their stories. A huge part of SOAR is helping one another grow and learn. Flory saw a lot of this at this year’s symposium.
“I think my biggest takeaway this year was probably the fact that we have a lot of great young females who are coaching all over the country. The opportunity to host this showed me how hungry these females are for success and how open they are to learning and sharing,” Flory said. “I think my biggest impression was just how special the women coaches are.”
Having been a coach for 35 years, Flory has had a lot of ups and downs in her life and career. At SOAR she can share what she has gone through with her fellow coaches in hopes that she can help them better handle it if something comes their way.
“My goal was to provide a bit of my experiences so that the next person could be prepared when they face those challenges that I faced,” Flory said. “If one piece of information that I had and was able to share helped the next person, that’s my goal.”
Flory’s favorite part of SOAR is the female empowerment that takes place. Her goal is to help women to become the best coaches they can be.
“The biggest compliment I can get is all these letters that I just came back to from people that were at SOAR thanking me and saying they were empowered,” Flory said. “We need strong role models for young women [and] for them to know ‘I can be great at this job.’”
Flory was able to take some of what she learned and relay it back to her team. She was also able to let her team ask questions to all the coaches at SOAR. Flory felt it was important for them to get the chance to speak to all these women while they were all together.
“Women can be the leaders of the future,” Flory said. “And I think that is what SOAR is about, how to help. That’s the lesson that our team [learned]. We can lead in this area, we can lead in a lot of areas, but here’s one that we can really impact lives and make differences.”
Flory said SOAR is all about preparing female coaches for their leadership position.
“Women are super strong, and throughout history we have not been depicted in that way,” Flory said. “I think SOAR and my quest in this is to help women understand just how strong they can be.”

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Aurianna Cordero

LSU volleyball coach Fran Flory sits at her desk in the administrative building on Friday, Feb. 7, 2020.