Many people’s introduction to University of Hawaii alumnus Taylor Averill will take place in Paris, the picturesque site for his Summer Olympics debut with the U.S. men’s volleyball national team.
An old coach of his considers him one of the best middle blockers in the world. Perhaps his 36-inch vertical at 6 feet, 7 inches will make as much evident. An old trainer of his primarily knows him by his nickname, Sunshine, inspired by the bubbly backup quarterback in “Remember the Titans.” His long golden hair and ear-to-ear smile may offer some resemblance.
But Averill, 32, is not so easily summed up.
Before he became a two-time American Volleyball Coaches Association first-team All-American, he was a twice-suspended college athlete with tears tumbling down his face while seated across from former Hawaii assistant coach Jeff Hall in a Blazin’ Steaks restaurant.
The verdict had been reached days earlier. Averill was suspended from the team with no guarantee he would ever be welcomed back. He’d already transferred once, to Hawaii, after being dismissed from the men’s volleyball team at UC Irvine ahead of his true freshman season. A university somewhere in Canada was his only other remaining option.
For a proud party boy from San Jose who thought he could have it all, the buck finally stopped. He bottomed out. The next six months showed him just how far he was willing to go to salvage himself.
“Look what I’m capable of when it feels like life and death,” Averill said.
Sunshine
and rainbows
In his formative years, Averill nurtured his love for volleyball at open gyms in the Bay Area. He went to a local church on Mondays, Campbell Community Center on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and Camden Community Center on Wednesdays and Fridays. There was no designated setter, opposite or outside in these settings — only volleyball players, ages 13 to 60, prepared to count off numbers to organize into teams of six.
The experience was pure, recreational fun, a principle that had shaped his life.
Averill played volleyball, partied hard and smoked marijuana at his convenience in high school. Because why not? No harm, no foul, he thought. His personality was that of Sunshine, in both the cinematic and figurative senses. And he gave himself the nickname.
Hawaii head coach Charlie Wade said in jest that any valid nickname would need to be granted by someone else. Averill wasn’t joking.
He really was Sunshine, or Sunny, which turned out to be the abbreviated version.
“This was a really confident kid coming out of high school,” Wade said.
UC Irvine and John Speraw, the current U.S. national team coach, had the first crack at Averill. Speraw guided the Anteaters to their third NCAA national title, all under his direction, that year, which proved to be the last of his tenure. But Averill was already well off the team by then.
He lasted two months before being suspended and later dismissed from the program altogether.
Averill’s use of drugs, according to him, was a major factor that precipitated such a swift punishment. He continued to take classes for the full year. He just couldn’t play volleyball. So as his peers contributed to a dominant championship run, he contemplated a rather stark career change.
“I come from a musical family,” Averill said. “My brother’s a songwriter out here in L.A. My dad’s a professional musician, music pastor.
“I was like, ‘Well, maybe I’ll just do music now.’”
He casually played beach volleyball on occasion as he slowly wrapped his head around the possibility.
One phone call from Wade, who finished second in Averill’s initial recruitment, rescued him from any reality that featured him as a full-time musician and volleyball hobbyist. Wade expected his extension of a second chance to be met by a reformed Averill, or at least a version of himself willing to change. Averill had no such foresight. He took a flight across the Pacific Ocean to join the Rainbow Warriors while still on cruise control.
“Sweet, we’re back on,” Averill said.
Averill’s redshirt freshman season ended up largely inconsequential between the lines. He started 13 matches at opposite, amid the worst men’s volleyball season in program history. Hawaii finished with its lowest overall (.350) and conference (.222) winning percentages at 7-20 and 4-18 in the third year of a Wade tenure that started rather competitively.
Building a strong team culture was still very much a work-in-progress for Wade and company. Not that Averill could be bothered.
“I already had a chip on my shoulder that I just forgot about,” Averill said.
Hawaii was the perfect backdrop for Sunshine.
“I was still in that mode of, as long as I’m doing well in school and in volleyball, I can do whatever I want with my life and continue to do drugs and party and have a good time,” said Averill, who was named to the Mountain Pacific Sports Federation all-academic team in his first opportunity. “And I did. I had a blast.”
After Averill pulled a prank on an equipment manager, Wade had run out of patience.
Averill, apparently naive to the worst-case scenario ahead, was asked to the office after class one day. Wade and the rest of the coaching staff waited, with all of Averill’s items stuffed in a box at the center of a table, to inform him of his indefinite suspension. A redemptive path back to the team seemed unclear to all parties involved.
Surely, Wade pointed out change as a general prerequisite. What that exactly looked like, especially for an unruly young adult whose behaviors couldn’t even be swayed by a prior suspension, seemed unclear to all parties involved.
“I wasn’t trying to get rid of him,” Wade said. “I was trying to help him learn he had to change.”
On a fundamental level, Averill had never forced himself to consider what was actually important to him. The risk of losing his last opportunity to play Division I volleyball, and as a result jeopardizing the possibility of a promising professional career, stirred a visceral sense of urgency from Averill. He was not ready to let the sport go.
A Hawaii athletic trainer, Daniel Mar Chong, offered the structure for Averill to observe a drastic physical and mental transformation in half a year.
“It’s like, if we’re going to do this, you need to be completely immersed in it,” Mar Chong said.
The university did not require Mar Chong to train Averill, who at the time also needed to rehab from shoulder surgery. Mar Chong wasn’t even assigned to men’s volleyball in any official capacity as a staff trainer.
And yet, he effectively served as a personal trainer to Averill, in addition to a handful of his homegrown Hawaii teammates, free of charge.
Hawaii Baptist Academy alumnus Ryan Leung introduced Mar Chong to Averill, who jokes to this day that he probably owes the now-owner of Mar Training up to $1 million for the countless hours of non-traditional training that fueled his comeback.
How Mar Chong trained Averill was unique to Averill and his goals, “bridging technical skills (and) physical training to enhance performance,” as is outlined on the home page of his company website. Volleyball players need the power to jump high but also the endurance to do so many times over the course of a match — both factors that shaped Mar Chong’s specialized program for Averill. Jump training, plyometrics and shoulder rehab were among emphases that spanned several hours of work daily.
Averill was still permitted to attend team strength training workouts, too.
After three months, he saw his “baby fat” replaced by prominent abs. And by the time Averill was welcomed back to the team soon before his sophomore season kicked off in January, he already had his New Year’s resolution. Keep doing what he’d been doing. The results spoke for themselves.
Averill dropped his weight by 20 pounds, added 11 inches to his vertical and finished his latest school term with a 4.0 GPA.
“In six months, I completely recreated myself,” Averill said.
“The best part was, I wasn’t fooling myself. I (freaking) loved it. I loved waking up at 6 every morning and working out. … It showed me that volleyball was something that I genuinely loved.”
Life and volleyball
A condition of Averill’s return was that he would move to middle blocker, a position he had never played. The rest is history.
As a senior, he ranked second in hitting percentage (.488) and fifth in blocks (151) nationally to help lead Hawaii to its first NCAA Tournament appearance in the Wade era. Averill’s individual accolades were plenty. But for the first time in his life, he was part of something that went beyond the sport he played.
Post-Averill, Hawaii went to four consecutive national championship games from 2019 to 2023 — and won two — as the first school to do so since the 1990s. Only a number of “OG” fans will remember what he and his 2015 class accomplished, and he said that’s OK. No one can take away what he went through, the lessons he learned, and how that impacted the foundations of a program now considered a perennial powerhouse.
“What they don’t tell you is, it doesn’t matter what you do in your career,” Averill said. “It really doesn’t. It’s about who you become. Volleyball is just a conduit for me learning more about myself and what I’m capable of.”
Nearly a decade into his professional career, Averill will become only the third Hawaii men’s volleyball player to compete at the Olympics for Team USA, which has been coached by Speraw since 2013. Talk about a full-circle moment.
Sunny has never shined brighter.
“Taylor would have ended up on that team regardless of who the coach is,” Wade said. “That’s kind of the theme of this whole thing, that he took control of his life.”
