“No.”
Are you sure you don’t want to keep doing this?
“Probably not.”
That was Jacie Van de Zilver’s answer in 2022 when former Azusa Pacific University acrobatics and tumbling assistant coach Kara Willard asked the then-senior athlete if she’d ever consider coaching the sport. They were on a plane flight back to Southern California from the national championship. She was pretty sure that this sport, however great it was, was over for her.
And that was okay.
On Feb. 22, Van de Zilver walked out of the tunnel at Matthew Knight Arena as Oregon’s newest assistant coach. The No. 4 Ducks were about to face No. 1 Baylor in a top-five matchup that could define their season. She was fully immersed in her second year as a coach, two years after telling Willard she’d never be one.
What went wrong?
“Nothing,” she said. “I’m a religious person. I put a lot of myself, and my identity in my faith. It was one of those things where it just felt a little too easy to not be a sign — like, ‘You should do this.’”
After a year as an assistant with Hawaii Pacific University, she joined Oregon head coach Taylor Susnara’s staff as a different perspective to the Eugene-taught group already there. She’s learned the importance of perspective both in how to explain a skill and how to whisper encouragement. She’s discovered that it’s not going to feel the same as being an athlete, and that that’s okay. She’s found a home in a place that feels weirdly like one, but nothing like Honolulu or Azusa.
It’s all okay.
WIDE AWAKE
Van de Zilver doesn’t wake up the same way anymore.
A five-year athlete in the sport, she said that she’d rise in the morning on meet days and have to be ready to go. There was no time to rest; she’d get up and start visualizing the meet.
“The moment I woke up,” she said, “I was like, ‘Go, go go.’”
Now, she can be a little more casual. She thinks about what she has to get ready to keep the meet running smoothly. She thinks about the athletes. She thinks about the food, which she organizes now — Oregon’s athletes will have rice and beans before their second meet. It’s a little different.
“I wish I could help them — be out there on the mat with them,” Van de Zilver said. “I can’t. There’s nothing I can do to control that, other than words. It’s pretty hands-off.”
Some of it is the same. She’s been part of a pre-meet chapel at each of her stops as part of a collaboration with the Fellowship of Christian Athletes. It started with a devotional speech at Azusa Pacific, where “everything revolves around faith,” and took different forms along the way. In Eugene, it’s a smaller group, but it still helps.
Before meets — after the national anthem — Van de Zilver and junior athlete Niya Hewitt pray together. Before the team event, the two lock eyes across the sideline.
“It’s a ‘you’ve got this’ kind of thing,” Van de Zilver said. “That’s my person.”
Unlike Azusa Pacific, Oregon isn’t a Christian college. But this is still her slice of home, and she’s found her people.
“It’s honestly really reassuring,” she said.
“I really like Jacie,” Oregon base Bella Swarthout said. “She’s a little quiet at first, but I can’t imagine coming onto a team of 45 girls…the more comfortable she gets with all of us, I think she’s going to be an awesome coach.”
She has now spent seven years in a sport she discovered in high school. She’s the only member of an Oregon staff who didn’t learn to compete in Eugene. That’s part of why Susnara hired her.
Van de Zilver brings a new perspective. Born in New Jersey, she spent half a decade as an athlete across the country at Azusa Pacific, where she was taught skills and a hundred-page book of tenth-of-a-point deductions. The next year was in Hawaii, where she was surprised by the landing after the “leap of faith” she’d taken in accepting a job as an assistant coach.
Within the first week of her move from Azusa to Honolulu — not even the first day of coaching, she said, “I was like, ‘Oh, this is my dream job. I want to be doing this.’”
A coaching team of three former athletes knows exactly how each skill should feel: the impact of a teammate falling from above into your arms, or the thud of each foot and arm as tumblers race down the mat. The book can only take them so far, but gained wisdom can take them further.
“Coach Jacie has been a great asset to this program,” Oregon senior Alexis Giardina said during the season. “It’s really nice to have an outside perspective, someone that isn’t exactly Oregon-grown and trained, bringing different tips and tricks. I think culturally, she blends really well into our program.”
She blends so well that it sometimes looks like she forgets that she’s not still an athlete. Before the meet, the team claps its hands in unison as an athlete prepares her tumbling pass — ”Five, six, seven, CLAP.”
Van de Zilver, her shoulders taut, claps too.
She is the epitome of a sport stretching its wings. Acrobatics and tumbling — which holds its status as an NCAA Emerging Sport with eyes on a trophy with an NCAA-blue dot — now has programs nationwide.
Van de Zilver has competitive roots in four states. Some of her awards sit in California. Others spend their time in Hawaii. Still, more are waiting in her childhood home, in New Jersey.
The ones in her new office next to Autzen Stadium — the 2012 NCATA National Championship, amongst others — belong to Oregon. She’s a Duck now.
The three offices down a second-floor hallway in the Casanova Center house Oregon’s three coaches. Susnara’s door faces Van de Zilver and Nowak’s, hanging open when she’s in. Dialogue is welcome.
Given the opportunity to talk to the teenage version of herself, who wasn’t sure of her future, Van de Zilver wouldn’t attempt to change her mind — she “wouldn’t tell her anything,” she said.
That doesn’t mean she knows everything. She made sure to say that her younger self “definitely didn’t make all the right decisions.”
“Not everything was a good decision,” she said, “but it was the right one to get me where I am now.”
She doesn’t have a window in her office, but you can see the courtyard of the Hatfield-Dowlin Complex through the open doors and above Susnara’s cluttered desk. It’s raining.
People overrate how much it rains in Oregon, Van de Zilver said. Yes, Hawaii was nice. But it might’ve been worse in California.
Plus, these gray skies remind her of Jersey. It all feels like home.
WHISPER
She was part of a satisfied staff when she walked back up the Matthew Knight Arena tunnel for the first time after calling it home. Oregon had just scored more points against Morgan State University (281.205) than it had in any meet since 2021. It was an unmitigated success.
It’s not over.
“It doesn’t really matter what the scores are up on the board. In our sport, there’s no offense or defense,” Van de Zilver said.
She’s here to learn. She’s already preaching the mental fortitude and “0-0 mentality” that Susnara has instilled at Oregon with the intention of fortifying their team against nerves.
“It’s not like we can go out there and defend ourselves — knock down the other team,” she said. That’s just not how this sport works.”
It’s always about the next heat — not the last one. Just the next one. And the next. And the next.
The next week, when Baylor came to town, Van de Zilver was the only one with freshman tumbler Briya Alvarado as she prepared for her all-important aerial tumbling pass. It’s one of just a few times in the meet that an athlete was alone on the mat. Van de Zilver makes sure that she wasn’t — not in that moment.
She leaned over, and whispered in Alvarado’s ear something only they heard.
The pass went off without a hitch. Alvarado scored 9.675 out of a possible 10.0, the highest of her (admittedly young) college career. Van de Zilver smiled from the sideline. It’s just coaching.
“I honestly think it’s invaluable,” Susnara said. “I think that [Van de Zilver and Nowak are] able to connect and feel what the athletes are going through…when you’re able to do that, I think it helps the athletes click and have that mind-body connection that wouldn’t necessarily be there if we didn’t have the feel for it.”
You can hear the years of studying in Van de Zilver’s voice.
“Yeah, for sure…” she began an answer in her office. That’s exactly how Susnara begins many of her statements. They’re picking up on each other’s mannerisms, she said. They even catch one another using the other’s jokes.
Susnara is one of the best to learn from. She’s a few years ahead of Van de Zilver in all of this — a former Oregon All-American turned assistant who earned the head gig after three seasons coaching under former Ducks coach Keenyn Won. She’s grown into one of the NCATA’s coaching stars, with her eyes on a first national championship for the Ducks in over a decade.
Van de Zilver is here to learn from Susnara, she said. In her interview process with Oregon’s head coach, she was asked what she would do with the position, what goals she had.
Her answer: She wants to be here, to learn from one of the best and to experience a top program. And then, she wants to lead a program, like her head coach does.
“In due time,” Van de Zilver said.
BEST ADVICE
Baylor head coach Felecia Mulkey had some advice for Susnara, back when the Oregon head coach took the position.
“When Taylor took this job and she was hiring an assistant coach,” Mulkey said when she traveled to Eugene for the Bears’ meet against the Ducks, “I talked to her, and I remember telling her, ‘Look, hire somebody that you know you’re gonna be able to work with, that you really like, and just have fun and figure it out.’”
That’s what Susnara has done, twice. She’s hired former athletes whose skills complement her own, not carbon copies. Van de Zilver is “a lot more patient” than her, the head coach said, and that matters.
Van de Zilver corroborates: “Her patience can sometimes run a little thin,” she said, “but it’s okay. She just expects a lot — and that’s a good thing, especially as a head coach.”
“I take a lot of stuff with a grain of salt,” she continued. “I try to have grace, and I think a lot of that comes from my faith. It’s hard, and it’s easy to get lost in the little details of things.”
Van de Zilver remembers a moment in practice where she just couldn’t figure out how to explain a skill to her athletes. She found Susnara, who came over and explained it to the athletes.
It didn’t make sense at first, when Susnara’s words worked.
“[It was] exactly what I told them,” Van de Zilver said. It’s a lesson in the value of different points of view — gaining them, giving them and using them. That’s what she’s learned: that more perspectives are better. Hers is valuable here.
She hopes it’ll take her beyond the hallway with three offices and open doors someday — but not today. Today is for learning, for winning, and for growth. Today is for where she never thought she’d be.
Actually, there’s one thing she would tell her 18-year-old self:
“It’s all going to work out. This is where you belong.”
