Paco Labrador enters his eighth season as the head coach of the Navy volleyball team in the fall of 2025. He has compiled a 98-75 overall record in his seven seasons at Navy. This includes a 63-38 record in Patriot League regular season matches.
Additionally, Labrador’s teams have accounted for seven of the program’s 19 Patriot League Tournament victories.
Labrador has posted a 553-146 record in his 22 seasons as a head coach.
Navy has prepared for league play by facing notable volleyball teams Denver, Florida Gulf Coast, Loyola Marymount, Michigan, Penn State, UCF and UC Santa Barbara under Labrador, as well as additional teams from major conferences such as Alabama, Maryland, Michigan State, Notre Dame, Syracuse and West Virginia.
The Mids have reached at least the semifinal round of the Patriot League Tournament in five of Labrador’s six seasons in which a full regular season and tournament were played. This includes Navy advancing to the championship match in both 2018 and ‘22.
Away from the court, Labrador is a Class of 2025 Stockdale Associate Fellow from the USNA’s Stockdale Center for Ethical Leadership.
Labrador’s first season on The Yard was one for Navy’s record book. The 2018 Mids tied the program record for the most wins in a Division I season with a 23-9 mark, shared the regular season title in the Patriot League for the second time with a 13-3 record, advanced to the championship match of the Patriot League Tournament for the fourth time and won the event for the first time. The victory in the league tournament final propelled Navy into the NCAA Tournament for the first time as a Division I program.
Despite the loss of more than half of the 2018 starting lineup, six of the 12 letter winners and the school’s Division I career record holders in assists, blocks and digs, Navy posted a 17-12 overall record in 2019 and tied for third place in the Patriot League regular season with a record of 11-5. The Mids also advanced to the semifinal round of the league tournament.
Navy again advanced to the semifinal round of the Patriot League Tournament in 2021. The Mids additionally became the first Navy team to win a set from a nationally-ranked team when they did so against No. 23 Michigan, were the lone Patriot League team to register a sweep of eventual league-champion Colgate and won two matches at Army including the program’s second road sweep of the Black Knights.
The 2022 Mids compiled a 16-12 overall record and placed third in the league regular season standings with an 11-5 record. Navy dropped non-league matches to Florida Gulf Coast, which advanced to the NCAA Tournament, Maryland and Michigan State and posted a four-set victory over Notre Dame. The Mids won their quarterfinal round match against American, fought off two fifth-set matches points against them to defeat second-seeded Army in the semifinals and dug themselves out of a 0-2 deficit in sets before losing to top-seeded Colgate in the final.
Navy’s 2023 season saw the Mids start the year with an 8-1 record against non-league foes. This included the program’s first win over Maryland and a team that was a member of the Big Ten Conference at the time of the match, plus three-set victories in Southern California over Denver, San Diego State and UC San Diego. The only blemish for the Mids during this span was a four-set loss to a UCF team that was coming off of a second-round appearance in the 2022 NCAA Tournament.
Navy would go on to place fifth in the Patriot League regular season, which saw the Mids play seven five-set matches and end with a reverse sweep of Army in the Star Match. Navy then swept Bucknell on the road in the quarterfinal round of the league tournament and fell in four sets in the semifinal round to Colgate.
Labrador arrived at Navy in the summer of 2019 after guiding Wittenberg (NCAA Division III) to the 2011 NCAA Championship, two additional trips to the national championship match (2015, 2017) and a 455-71 record over his 15 seasons at the school.
Included among Wittenberg’s successes over his decade and a half at the school were the Tigers winning at least 25 matches in 14 seasons with a minimum of 30 victories coming in seven years, compiling a 162-2 record (98.8%) in the North Coast Athletic Conference’s regular season and posting a 35-1 record (97.2%) in winning 14 NCAC Tournaments. Wittenberg also appeared in 15 NCAA Tournaments, was ranked among the top-10 teams in the final national ranking 13 times and attained a ranking of no lower than third on six occasions. This span includes the Tigers being the nation’s top-ranked team in 2011 and the No. 2 team in the country in both 2015 and ‘17.
Labrador was tabbed as the 2011 American Volleyball Coaches Association Division III National Coach of the Year, received a pair of AVCA Great Lakes Region Division III Coach-of-the-Year accolades and was an eight-time recipient of the NCAC Coach-of-the-Year laurel.
His Wittenberg players earned 32 All-America awards, 38 all-region honors, 10 NCAC Player-of-the-Year nods, 61 all-conference certificates, one NCAA Elite 90 Award and five College Sports Information Directors of America Academic All-America accolades. He was announced as a 2022 inductee into Wittenberg’s Athletics Hall of Honor.
A 1995 graduate of Hiram College (Hiram, Ohio) with bachelor degrees in both psychology and exercise / sport science, Labrador began his coaching career as a student assistant coach for the school’s women’s volleyball team. He also founded Hiram’s men’s club volleyball team while attending the school. He then served as a volunteer coach at Miami (Ohio) for two years (1995 and ‘96 seasons) while he worked toward and attained a Master of Science in Sports Studies at the school. Labrador would go on to be a volunteer assistant coach with the Maryland women’s team during the 1997-98 academic year before returning to Miami University in August 1999 as a full-time member of the program’s coaching staff. He would remain at the Oxford, Ohio, school for four seasons until accepting the head coach position at Wittenberg in May 2003.
Labrador was inducted into the Miami (Ohio) Cradle of Coaches Association, which honors graduates of the school who went on to attain coaching success (Ara Parseghian, Bo Schembechler, Woody Hayes and John Harbaugh are among the other honored coaches), in 2016.
Paco and his wife, Jill, are the parents of two daughters, Olivia and Isabel.
