Volleyball Coaches
HEAD COACH
JENNIFER SANCHEZ MONTOYA
A year after head coach Jennifer Montoya and the Cardinals finished the season with a 17-17 record and earned a berth to the Heartland Conference championship tournament, the Cardinals suffered a down year, finishing with a 7-23 record in 2006. But Montoya and the Cardinals are looking for an ending similar to the 2005 season, when Montoya was named the league’s coach of the year.
Now, all the players on the roster belong fully to the coaches’ philosophy as she enters her fifth season as the UIW head coach. She is more comfortable with the fortunes of the program, a departure from her first days after being hired in the summer of 2003. It’s history now but the story remains worth repeating about how, in the early days, she
would work off tension by going to a local batting cage and taking out her aggression on the baseball.
Everywhere she has been, Jennifer Montoya has played for winning teams and she has garnered top individual awards. That includes being voted the Heartland’s coach of the year following 2005.
Immediately before UIW, she played professionally in Maia, Portugal. Her team Castelo da Maia Ginasio Clube won the Portuguese League Championship and the Portuguese Cup.
Those successes were an extension of what she accomplished at the University of Florida where she was a 1998 All-American player. Three times her teams reached the NCAA Final Four and the other year the Gators were in the Elite Eight. She led Florida to four Southeastern Conference titles and three SEC tournament championships.
At Florida, she earned a bachelor's degree in graphic design in 2002.
Her list of individual accomplishments at Florida are extensive. She was AVCA all-district twice, she was All-SEC twice, and three times All-SEC academic. In 1999 alone, she was on five different all-tournament teams. She received the Arthur Ashe Scholar-Athlete Award and the Multicultural Recognition Award.
Her high school training came right here in San Antonio. She is a graduate of Providence High School where in 1996 she was the Gatorade Southwest Regional Player of the Year and was the San Antonio EXPRESS-NEWS Player of the Year. In addition to being the school's athlete of the year, she was the scholar-athlete of the year.
Coach Montoya and her husband Adrian are the parents of daughter Maia Lynn (4) and Derek (3).
Student Assistant
Hector Torres-May
Hector Torres-May joined the Cardinals’ volleyball coaching staff as a student assistant in the fall of 2007.
Torres, a junior, came to Incarnate Word after spending two years at South Dakota State. While at SDSU, he was not only a member of the Jackrabbits’ baseball team as a middle infielder, but was also a student assistant for the Jacks’ volleyball team for two seasons. He helped lead the Jackrabbits to a third place finish at the Independent Championships in 2005.
Before moving the U.S., Torres played volleyball and baseball at St. Francis School in San Juan, Puerto Rico. He graduated in 2005 from David H. Hickman High School in Columbia, Missouri, where he was a member of the baseball team.
Torres is the son of UIW head softball coach Nora May-Davila and Angel Davila. His mom has spent time on the Puerto Rico Olympic softball team and was a softball umpire at the 2000 Olympic Games in Sydney, Australia. His dad was a pitcher on the Oakland A’s pitching staff.
