Kiski Area grad Christian Hartford helping train Olympic beach volleyball teams

The trip consumed five days and more than 2,000 highway miles between Indianapolis and California.

It could have been interminably boring, but only if you fail to consider the conversations inside the car.

Christian Hartford, a former Kiski Area quarterback (Class of 2008), had just accepted what he describes as “the closest thing to a dream job that I ever had.”

It was January 2019, and he was moving to Torrance, Calif., to become the performance director (strength and conditioning coach) for the USA men’s and women’s Olympic beach volleyball teams.

His mom, Susan Harger Hartford, rode with him, first flying to Indianapolis where Christian was attending a coaches’ conference. Then, they jumped in a car — after waiting for a snowstorm to subside — and hit the road for the better part of a week.

“Very special,” Christian said of the experience. “It was incredible. It was a lot of fun. Obviously, some really good mother-son bonding and some good conversation and some really good memories along the way.

“We talked about how we both couldn’t believe I was moving to California to work for an Olympic team.”

His good fortune brought to mind a Phil Knight quote from his book, “Shoe Dog,” in which he wrote, “Lead me from the unreal to the real.”

“He had all these moments where he said, ‘I can’t believe this is real.’ ”

Christian understood how Knight felt.

“We had a lot of conversations along the way,” Hartford said of his mother. “To go from an unpaid intern (at the University of Michigan) to $1,000 a month (at Northwestern) to a full-time job (at the University of Maryland) and, then, to California to work with an Olympic team, all within five years. It was a very surreal moment.”

Sadly, it eventually turned out to be especially memorable for another reason when Susan Harger Hartford, a former Kiski Area School Board member, died a year later from colon cancer.

The time with his mom did help smooth the transition toward a dramatic career move. But Christian already had laid the foundation.

After graduating from Kiski Area, Christian walked on to the Wake Forest football team, where his older brother, Matt, was a wide receiver.

Christian earned a degree in kinesiology from Wake Forest and a master’s in sports administration from Northwestern and eventually was hired at Maryland, working with the women’s volleyball and several other teams from 2016-18.

Using Maryland’s continuing education budget, he traveled to Anaheim, Calif., to shadow the U.S. men’s and women’s indoor volleyball teams’ strength coaches. While there, he did an impromptu 30-minute presentation of his work at Maryland, leading to a job offer last year from the beach team.

It appeared to be serendipitous timing, with the Tokyo Olympics scheduled for the summer of 2020. Covid-19 changed those plans, however, forcing the postponement of the Olympics to 2021.

It was disappointing, but Hartford said the athletes adapted quickly.

“One of the things about being in athletics and working with elite athletes is that you’re forced to be adaptable,” he said. “If you wake up one day and you know you have two matches that day, but you didn’t sleep well and you wake up and feel terrible, you have to adapt and figure out the best way to go about things.

“Whenever we got news of (the postponement, we said), ‘All right. How are we rescheduling? How are we doing workouts from home? What equipment do you need? What’s the best way of communication?’

“After the initial shock that it was postponed, within a week we were up and running with workout programs. It was back to business as usual.”

And Hartford doesn’t plan to let anyone rest, especially when he gets the athletes face-to-face again.

“We’ll be on the bike, and he’s always screaming at you,” men’s player Tri Bourne told Volleyballmag.com.

While growing up in Allegheny Township, Hartford didn’t have a lot of exposure to volleyball. But he took a course in college as a requirement toward his degree, and his cousin, Chris Harger, was on the U.S. team 20 years ago.

“It’s totally different because they play on sand that moves under your feet. It’s a completely unstable surface,” Hartford said. “That changes the training.

“At the end of the day as the strength coach, my main job is to learn the sport, learn the athlete and figure out what program is going to be best for that athlete to take them to the next level, to reach their peak.”