York University Women's Volleyball

Tran was the recipient of the Ontario Volleyball Association Coach of the Year award in 2005 and he also runs a successful Vipers volleyball club in Toronto. Previously, he was an assistant coach for the provincial team and an assistant coach for the gold-medal winning Region 5 team at the provincial championship. Tran was a member of the coaching staff for the Canada Games provincial team that won silver in P.E.I. in 2009.   In addition to his coaching duties, Tran is the principal of Bloordale Middle School, a medium-sized middle school within the Toronto District School Board. He believes that schools today are teaching a generation of students who, in most cases, are more technologically knowledgeable than their parents and teachers. In order to engage students in their own learning, he believes that we must recognize the power of technology and actively implement it to improve the teaching and learning process on a daily basis.    Prior to becoming principal, Tran taught Information and Communication Technology (ICT) to middle school students where he was a co-recipient, along with Ben Tran, of the Prime Ministers Awards for Teaching Excellence: Certificate of Achievement. He received this prestigious award for recognizing and using the teaching potential of ICT to its fullest while assembling a state-of-the-art ICT facility to facilitate the integration of information and communication technology across the curriculum. Nick Tran

Jennifer Neilson enters her eighth season as York women's volleyball head coach in 2025-26. In the 2024-25 season, Neilson led the Lions to a 10-10 season and narrowly missed the playoffs, finishing 9th in the OUA. She joined the Lions coaching staff in 2018 and is the sixth coach in program history. Over her tenure at York, she has guided the team to four playoff appearances and one playoff win, a five-set road victory over the McMaster Marauders in the 2023 OUA quarter-finals – the program’s first postseason triumph since the 2013 OUA semi-final over Toronto. Neilson began coaching at an elite level while attending the University of Toronto, as she spent time as an assistant coach with Team BC’s 16U women’s team in 2013 and became an assistant coach with the Team Ontario 18U team in 2014. After graduating from U of T with a bachelor of kinesiology in 2015, she became an assistant coach for the women’s volleyball team at the University of Windsor while she completed her master’s in human kinetics. Most recently, she’s been a head coach with the Halton Region Volleyball Club, Team Ontario’s 16U women’s team, and worked with the OVA as high-performance coordinator and apprentice coach.   Neilson is also well-rounded at the administrative level, having developed and managed programming for the OVA’s high-performance plan and lead their high-performance athlete identification process.   As a star outside hitter with the Varsity Blues, Neilson was named to the OUA all-star team three years in a row from 2013-15 and was named to the CIS national championship all-star team in 2015. The Port Coquitlam, B.C., native was also a two-time academic all-Canadian, and attended Volleyball Canada selection camps for the senior A team in 2014 and the FISU Games team in 2015. 

A former Lions volleyball player from 2013 to 2015, Octavia Wong joins the Lions coaching staff ahead of the 2021-22 season. She has expanded her volleyball career upon finishing her playing career, currently competing with the Philadelphia CIA team winning back-to-back New York Championships and finishing third place in North America. Her coaching career is not beginning with the Lions – Wong joined Leaside Volleyball Club as a coach in 2015-16, helping 17U and 18U teams to multiple provincial and national medals, including a national championship win in 2018-19. While competing at York, she made multiple podium finishes at the Ontario and Quebec beach tours as a plauer, winning the 2015 U22 national championship. Wong is currently a full-time PhD student in biostatistics at York. Her roles at York include serving on the health coordination table for the university as an epidemiology research analyst.