Duquesne University Athletics

With over 300 victories on the Bluff, head coach Steve Opperman has elevated Duquesne volleyball to a top-tier program in the Atlantic 10 Conference. He enters his 29th season at Duquesne and his 36th season overall as a head coach in 2026.
   

Opperman, whose teams have appeared in 10 of the past 15 Atlantic 10 Championships, guided the Dukes to the school's first  A-10 regular season and tournament championship in 2013. The 2013 Dukes went on to make the first NCAA Championship appearance in school history.

In his 28 years at Duquesne, Opperman has seen nearly every team and individual record broken highlighted by program records for wins (23 in 2010) and conference wins (12 in 2013). Over the past 13 full seasons, the Dukes have averaged over 15 wins and just under eight A-10 victories per year.

The 2025 season marked a historic milestone for Opperman, who secured his 500th career victory with a dramatic 3-2 win over RMU in a five-set thriller on Sept. 6. Under his leadership, the Dukes earned their 15th Atlantic 10 Championship appearance in program history and the 12th under Opperman, advancing to the semifinals for the first time since 2021. Duquesne finished the season with 18 wins, its highest total since 2016, while also recording nine conference victories, the program’s most since 2014

A developer of talent, Opperman has coached a pair of AVCA All-Americans in Liz Homan (2010) and Arielle Love (2014) and seen 19 players earn first or second team All-Atlantic 10 honors a total of 23 times. Adding to his resume, he has coached just the second A-10 Rookie of the Year in DU history, in Chloe Wilmot (2023) while twenty-seven of his recruits have been named to the A-10 All-Rookie Team.
 

Opperman's DU teams have also excelled in the classroom. In addition to consistently ranking as one of the top performing academic teams on campus, Duquesne has been recognized by the American Volleyball Coaches Association (AVCA) numerous times for academic excellence. Opperman has seen 16 players named A-10 Academic All-Conference. 13 of his student-athletes have earned College Sport Communicators (formerly CoSIDA) Academic All-District honors, with Sarah Morrow (2002) being named A-10 Student-Athlete of the Year.

Prior to his arrival in Pittsburgh, Opperman served as head coach at Wright State for seven seasons where he led the Raiders to 119 victories and a pair of berths in the National Invitational Volleyball Championship. 
 

Opperman started his collegiate coaching career in 1989 as an assistant coach at the University of Dayton. The following season he took the assistant coach position at Wright State before assuming the role of head coach in 1991.
 

Opperman graduated from Ohio State in 1987 with a bachelor's degree in marketing. On the court, he was an outside hitter with the Buckeyes for the 1983-84 season leading them to a 28-11 overall record and a second place finish in the Midwestern Intercollegiate Volleyball Association.
 

The New Bremen, Ohio native holds memberships in the American Volleyball Coaches and United States Volleyball Associations. He was a voting member of the CSTV/AVCA Top 25 poll from 1999 until 2006 and served as the Atlantic 10 representative to the AVCA Head Coaches Committee from 2000-2005. In 1996, he was a panel speaker at the Final Four Volleyball Convention.