Adrian Lynch, shown coaching boys volleyball at Dominican High School in Whitefish Bay in 2017, is the girls volleyball coach at St. Anthony High School, runs the Reinas de la Cancha volleyball coach and founded and runs the Southside Catholic League. (File photo)

For someone who loves sports, Adrian Lynch is living a pretty blessed life.

Lynch, the varsity girls volleyball coach at St. Anthony High School in Milwaukee, is the head of the Reinas de la Cancha (Queens of the Court) volleyball club and founded and runs the Southside Catholic League.

“I look at sports as such as small part of your life, and some people do make it their lives, and I get that, but for me, it’s a fun part,” said Lynch, a member of St. John Paul II Parish in Milwaukee. “I can never forget that. Really reflecting on that in prayer helps me come that conclusion.”

Circumstance, coincidence and fortunate timing have led Lynch to where he is today.

Growing up, he was a basketball and soccer player, and he started coaching at age 17 to get service hours while he was a student at St. Thomas More High School.

When the school at his parish was on the verge of eliminating volleyball, he stepped up to coach the team.

He started playing volleyball as a young adult, up to as many as six nights a week.

“I fell in love with the sport,” Lynch said. “Volleyball came to me later in life. I learned the sport and now I coach it.”

He learned the intricacies and nuances of the game, and how to teach it to others, while coaching the team at St. John Paul II.

He went on to coach the boys volleyball team at Dominican High School in Whitefish Bay as the program began playing at the varsity level in 2017.

His love of volleyball and some of the peculiarities of restrictions brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic led him to form the Reinas de la Cancha club.

He was coaching what he called a really talented eighth grade team at St. John Paul II, but because of COVID, there were no school sports in the archdiocese at the time. What he realized was, while most everything was shut down in the city of Milwaukee, that wasn’t the case in the suburbs.

Enter the Milwaukee Sting Volleyball Center in Menomonee Falls.

After the team had practiced outside at public parks until the weather got too cold, the Sting offered the team practice space.

He held a meeting in his back yard for players and parents, and explained the logistics of forming a club volleyball program. Because of the all-Hispanic makeup of the roster, the club was also able to receive a grant that allowed it to get up and running.

When Lynch was in grade school, his teams played in a league hosted by St. Josaphat. However, that league had folded by the mid-2010s and what he saw was schools on the south side of Milwaukee spread out through various leagues.

To rectify that, he began talks with schools and the Archdiocese of Milwaukee about forming what became the Southside Catholic League in 2019.

The league was supposed to begin in 2020, but again, COVID altered those plans. It did begin in 2021 with four schools (St. Josaphat, St. John Paul II, Salam School and St. Anthony) and is now up to 19.

Demographically, the league is mostly Hispanic, comprised of a preponderance of Catholic schools, with a sprinkling of charter schools. Traditional leagues, such as the Parkview and Don Bosco leagues, couldn’t offer what those schools needed.

Lynch noted the league needed a central location for games and practices, because the feedback he received was there was a large segment of parents that were unable or unwilling to make long drives to suburban schools when their teams often weren’t very competitive.

“The other issue was coaching,” Lynch said. “It’s easier to sell a coach on ‘I only need you twice a week and then on Saturday for an hour at the same location.’ That helped with parents’ scheduling, too. I needed to take away the excuses the parents would have.”

Now, the league hosts all of its volleyball and basketball games at St. Anthony High School and soccer is played at Divine Mercy.

Through his coaching journey, Lynch has found himself at a variety of Catholic institutions, something that has become a comfort zone for him.

“(Faith) plays a part anywhere I’ve coached,” Lynch said. “It’s easy for me to marry those two. I think they go hand in hand. When you’re an athlete, you understand your playing days are really finite, and somehow of the thousands and thousands of kids, you were the one who was able to take it that far. It doesn’t negate the work, but I think athletes believe there is some divine intervention.”