Former Harvard Men’s Volleyball team captain Chase Howard ’20 enters his second season with the Crimson in 2025 after being named an assistant coach by head coach Brian Baise in June 2023. The former all-EIVA selection returns to Cambridge after spending the 2022-23 season coaching women’s volleyball in Virginia.
During the 2024 season, Howard helped lead the Crimson to a 12-13 overall record and an EIVA Tournament semifinals appearance. In his first year on the sideline, Howard was instrumental in the development of four EIVA weekly honors recipients and First-Team All-EIVA honoree, Ethan Smith.
The Crimson went 9-15 in the 2025 season including making a return to the EIVA Tournament as the six-seed. Harvard faced a host of ranked opponents in 2025 including No. 4 Hawaii in the first two matches of the season. Howard helped the Crimson push the Rainbow Warriors to five sets in the second match which ultimately earned the team national recognition with a No. 20 ranking in the AVCA poll. To open EIVA action, Howard also helped lead the Crimson to a historic three-set sweep of No. 17 Penn State, snapping the Nittany Lions 38-match conference win streak. In 2025, Howard was instrumental in leading four Crimson to EIVA honors including James Bardin and Logan Shepherd earning Second Team All-EIVA and Zach Berty and Owen Woolbert receiving Honorable Mention All-EIVA.
After earning his Harvard degree in Environmental Science and Public Policy in May of 2020, Howard served as the Crimson’s volunteer assistant coach for the 2020-21 campaign, while concurrently making a difference working as an accessioning technician at The Broad Institute. When Howard was not keeping the team connected during a 2021 season with no competition due to the pandemic, he was involved with COVID-19 testing at The Broad Institute.
Howard later returned to his native state of Virginia and his alma mater, Princess Anne High School in Virginia Beach, in the summer of 2022 to become the school’s women’s volleyball coach. In the fall, he became the women’s beach volleyball head coach for Beach 757 Club.
The libero/outside hitter arrived at Harvard as a 2016 junior national team member and played immediately as a first-year, seeing action in 22 of 23 matches. The experience paid off in 2018 when the sophomore was named the National Libero of the Month three times before helping the Crimson win the EIVA tournament title and earn an NCAA berth. Howard’s Harvard career was cut short, however, in 2020 due to the pandemic. Despite the setback, he still collected all-conference honors from the EIVA and was Harvard Athletics’ recipient of the John P. Fadden Award.
