- June 24, 2026
-
-
Loading
Loading
The evening of Aug. 18 will be no ordinary evening for Dan Konczak. He’ll feel conflicted, and maybe, a bit unsettled by the occasion.
His own daughter, Sydney Konczak, will be on the side of the net opposite from his team. Bradenton Christian plays Cardinal Mooney that night in the latter’s home opener.
Across all his years in volleyball, he’s never had an opponent quite like this. It’ll be a family affair — a house divided — when he debuts with the Cougars.
The scheduling quirk isn’t lost on Dan Konczak, who’s now two weeks into his new gig as the Cardinal Mooney girls volleyball coach. He was hired June 12 to lead the program following Allan Knight’s resignation in September 2025 and Leah Mihm’s tenure as interim.
“God has a funny sense of humor with some of that,” Konczak said. “(Panthers) coach (Zach) VanDuinen and I are great friends. To leave BCS and to leave him and all these girls that I’ve helped bring up through the program, including my own daughter, was a horribly hard decision.”
Last season ended with a 15-11 record in the FHSAA Class 3A-Region 3 quarterfinals for the Cougars, who won the 3A-11 district championship. They were even better in Knight’s first year at 22-5 en route to the 3A-3 regional final.
Stability, though, has been in short supply for the program this decade. Chad Sutton oversaw back-to-back state title match appearances from 2018-19 and the program’s first championship in 2019, but Cardinal Mooney has gone through multiple coaches since his 2020 departure.
Konczak is the fourth in that regard. And it’s his first appointment as head coach for a varsity program following eight years of working his way up at Bradenton Christian.
“This is not a rebuild. (Athletic Director Rafael) Fernandez made it very clear,” Konczak said. “He’s handing me the keys to a Lamborghini.”
His daughters, Nariah and Sydney Konczak, are the reason he first picked up a clipboard and took up coaching in the gym.
Volleyball was not a sport he grew up around or knew anything about before them. He played basketball and football at Esko High School in Minnesota, but after the Konczak family moved to Bradenton in March 2017, his daughters soon dove into the science of digs, sets and hits.
He hung around their coaches as much as he could and stayed curious. Initially, it was just to understand the fundamentals of the game — to facilitate his daughters’ learning.
Over time, Konczak picked up on the similarities between volleyball and the sports he knew best. His interest in it continued to blossom.
“This game is so fast, so exciting — it just drew me in,” Konczak said. “In my brain, I still relate things to basketball and football a little bit, so I put my own spin on it in that way sometimes. Once I got into it, I really got hooked quickly.”
Experiences at the high school level have gone hand-in-hand with experiences at the club level. Since he got into the sport eight years ago, he’s coached with Bradenton Spartans Elite, keeping busy when high school volleyball is in the offseason.
His first position at Bradenton Christian was with its middle school team. He later coached with the freshman team, junior varsity and most recently, was a varsity assistant in 2025.
Even when Konczak wasn’t formally on the sideline for the Panthers, he was persistent about following the team.
“I’ve always valued relationships, and I’ve had such an appetite to learn,” Konczak said. “I basically was at all the varsity stuff all year round… I would help out wherever I could, and I just kept learning and learning and learning.”
In his first week with the Cougars, Konczak dug through whatever film he could find from last season to learn whatever he could about the team’s returning players. He’s met a few of them, but with everyone scattered during the summer, there's more meetings coming.
His definition of a great coach is one who maintains a high standard and prioritizes accountability. As of June 22, he’s actively building a staff that shares that vision and will be prepared to execute it once tryouts begin July 27.
Konczak also expects each and every one of his assistants to build up the kids in the program. From that, he said, wins will come.
“I want the coaching staff to pour into the kids. I want the kids to fight for each other,” Konczak said. “I want this program to have an absolute monster mentality. Mentally, we need to be strong enough where it doesn’t matter if we’re up 16-6 or down 16-6.”
His oldest daughter, 19-year-old Nariah Konczak, graduated from Bradenton Christian in 2025 and is a rising sophomore at the State College of Florida.
Sydney Konczak is a rising senior outside hitter for the Panthers at 17 years old. August 18 against the Cougars will be a strange feeling for her, too, seeing her father by the opposing bench.
With his daughters’ high school volleyball journeys near completion, Dan Konczak has embarked on a journey of his own — even if it required some tough conversations.
“It was a big family decision,” Konczak said. “A lot of talking.”
