Two days, two new coaches for Olympia area college teams.

On Tuesday, South Puget Sound announced the hiring of Aaron Landon as the Clippers’ head men’s basketball coach. And on Wednesday, Evergreen announced that Angela Spoja was hired to the long vacant position of head volleyball coach.

Aaron Landon comes to the SPSCC from Concordia University in Portland, where he has been an assistant for the past two seasons. The native of Davis, California was responsible for recruiting in California, where he was an assistant coach at Marina High School and assistant at Santa Monica College before moving to Portland. In his time at Concordia, the Cavaliers went 29-30. Landon played basketball at the University of La Verne and Monterey Peninsula College.

Landon’s head coaching duties are combined with a full-time position as an educational planner for SPSCC. He takes over for Curtis Norwood, who resigned after the season, and will have to replace 56 points from departing sophomores on a team that went just 4-21 last season and given the fluid nature of community college rosters from year to year, he will probably have to bring in a whole new team.

This is Landon’s first head coaching job, but he is a young guy that has some experience recruiting in the Northwest in his time at Concordia and has contacts in California that could help him land some out of state talent that seems to be the key to success in the NWAACC these days.

Meanwhile, at Evergreen, Angela Spoja  is one of the most accomplished coaches the Geoducks have hired in a very long time. Spoja spent eight seasons at Tacoma Community College where she was named NWAACC coach of the year three times and went undefeated in 2007 and 2010. She also oversees operations for the South Sound Volleyball Club in Tacoma.

Spoja has a tough job ahead of her trying to turn around a moribund program that went 0-46 over the last two seasons under Greg Spector and Geoduck volleyball has gone just 44-203 since 2001. Can Spoja make Evergreen attractive to volleyball players? For a variety of reasons, volleyball just isn’t a good fit as a sport for Evergreen but I think her experience in the community college ranks will help her draw more local transfers to the program and could yield some good players from the NWAACC. She also has strong roots in the local volleyball scene and will have better success recruiting in local high schools.

The Geoducks’ volleyball season starts in just a few months on September 6th.