What Bill Miller needed was a new volleyball coach at Polk County High School. What he had instead was a dilemma.
Once Kelly Risley’s resignation in the summer of 2014 as the Wolverines’ head coach was official, Polk County’s superintendent followed the usual standard practice – posted the position, convened a search committee, had them interview applicants with the goal of a recommendation. That the committee delivered, recommending an older coach who also had experience teaching physical education. And that normally would have been the end of things.
Except Jeff Wilson had an alternate idea.
Get PolkSports delivered to your inbox
Sign up for our free newsletter →
Polk County’s athletic director did something he rarely did – he approached Miller and suggested the district hire another candidate, a recent college graduate with ties to the area.
“Jeff Wilson came to me personally and said, we are making a mistake,” Miller recalled. “He wasn’t downgrading that person. It was more that this girl played Western North Carolina volleyball. She came through this West Henderson program, she came through what her mother and family and everyone has been part of up there.
“She’s been part of a volleyball tradition and knows how to make it happen from the ground up, a real program, not just a fly-by-night, couple of years coach.”
Wilson’s argument won the day – Miller decided to go with his candidate instead of the choice of the broader committee.
Wilson called the candidate to offer her the job, catching her at lunch with her family. She immediately accepted.
Molly Corhn was Polk County’s new volleyball coach – and the Wolverine program hasn’t been the same since.
“As it turned out, luckily, we were right,” Miller said.
Wilson made a second phone call that day, one to announce the hire. He shared the backstory of the hire and summarized his thought process in a simple sentence: “She’s one in a zillion.”
A quick stroll past the trophy case located outside Polk County’s gymnasium or the wall outside Molly Corhn Hill’s office shows just how spot on Wilson’s instincts were.
Two state championship banners. Multiple conference titles. A program transformed from one of the area’s best into a perennial powerhouse now yearly part of the conversation around state final contenders.
Hill dreamed of such success. But as Polk County prepares to open the 2025 3A playoffs Saturday at home against Wheatmore, perhaps even she might not have envisioned just how well her vision for creating a thriving volleyball program would fare. Consider:
- Her career record of 229-74, built in 12 seasons, means Polk has averaged 19 wins per season in her tenure.
- Those 229 wins are more than any Polk County coach has amassed in a single sport except for Wilson (332 wins in softball) and Lennox Charles (328 wins as Polk County’s girls soccer coach).
- Hill’s career winning percentage of .756 means the Wolverines have won three of every four games she has coached. It’s also the highest winning percentage of any coach in school history with at least three seasons, leading Heather Claussen (.736 in five volleyball seasons), Wilson (.717 in 18 softball seasons) and Marc Combs (.705 in seven soccer seasons).
- She is one of three Polk County coaches with multiple state titles, joining Steve Aldred (four titles in track and cross country) and Charles (two titles in boys and girls soccer). Only she and Aldred have won consecutive state titles.
One in a zillion, indeed.
And that doesn’t touch on the work Hill has done to create a community around the sport in Polk County. High school volleyball was doing just fine before she arrived – Polk had a run of nine straight winning seasons and a regional final appearance before her hire. But there was no Polk County Volleyball Club, no PCVC Academy, no widespread support for the sport at the recreation and middle school levels as it enjoys now.
“We had good teams, but we really did not have the program that she has developed now,” Miller said. “There’s travel, there’s continuity of kids coming up through the program, being part of something that has great pride and works hard. I feel like she has established in Polk much like what we had hoped that she was part of at West Henderson.
“People focus on the state championships, and that’s all well and good. But it’s more than that, it’s kids have the opportunity to be part of a program where if they have great pride in in and they work hard, they see results. They have this athletic experience, something they’ll remember every part of the rest of their lives.”
And yet Jeff Wilson very nearly didn’t get the chance to make it all happen.
As she always does, Hill had a plan for how her post-college career would go – she would graduate from Lees-McRae, where she played volleyball for four seasons, and return to the West Henderson community to teach physical education and coach volleyball at Rugby Middle School. Hill’s mom, Shawn Corhn, held those positions for many years, becoming a beloved and highly-regarded coach and teacher. Hill planned to follow that same path.
Life had other ideas.
“Long story short, that did not work out. Looking back on it, I was devastated,” Hill said. “I felt like I’d let my mom down, and I didn’t know what I was going to do. I had kind of put my eggs into one basket.”
There would be one more opportunity – Asheville High needed a coach, and then-athletic director Rex Wells, who would later work with Hill at Polk County, offered Hill that position. But it was a coaching job only, no teaching spot, and Hill declined.
She kept applying for jobs, kept looking for openings, until the position at Polk County opened. She knew the school, having helped Risley with some Wolverine practices as well as a summer camp. She knew Wilson, having kept a business card he gave her one day while at practice.
That card came in handy. It now is affixed to the wall in her office.
“I owe him so much with my career because he really believed in me and he gave me the opportunity,” Hill said. “I owe a lot to Bill Miller and Jeff Wilson. They were just so good to me, they took care of me, they believed in me from the start.
“It didn’t work out (at Rugby), but it was the best thing ever. I think it proves that you just have to trust God’s plan. I would never have accomplished what I have accomplished here in 12 years at a middle school. I would never have been a state champion. I would never have gotten asked to coach in the first-ever state all-star game.
“I said from the beginning that I wanted to create a program and put us on the map. I really feel like that’s happened. And so, now, we’re kind of in that part where it’s like, OK, what can we do next?”
Perhaps it’s natural that Molly Hill has enjoyed so much success as a coach.
“They grew up in the gym,” said Hill’s mother, Shawn Corhn, of Molly Hill and her two older siblings, Allyson and Daniel. “I coached volleyball and track, and I had them out on the track in the snow, had them out there when they were sweating. They would ride their bikes, they worked hard.
“I had them in the gym with me from the time they were born until they went to college. It’s just our thing, it’s our life and it’s what we did.”
Hill played for her mom at Rugby Middle before matriculating to West Henderson to play for legendary head coach Jan Stanley. The Falcons won a state title in 2009 and played for another in 2010 with Hill in the lineup. She signed to continue her career at Lees-McRae, where she cracked the starting lineup by her sophomore year.
That Hill would major in health and physical education at Lees-McRae was never in doubt – she’d been walking that path since her first day of school.
“I was in kindergarten saying that I was going to be a PE teacher,” Hill said. “I think that’s because that’s all I knew. There were times when I was like, I could do hair, and that would last a couple of months. There was a moment where I briefly considered being a nurse.
“But nothing lasted. I’ve always known that this is what I was called for. We joke about it and it’s in our blood because all three of us are in education and followed in our mom’s footsteps. But, seriously, that’s just all we know.”
Hill spent more than a few days on the bench with her mom, helping coach club teams and occasionally dropping in to help with at Rugby. Shawn Corhn could see early on that her youngest child had a knack and passion for coaching – and a bit of drive to succeed.
“I think she has the passion for sure, but I think she really sees the court and understands the game,” Corhn said. “She knows how to make good adjustments and is really smart about when to make a move and when to wait.
“We are all very competitive, so she gets that naturally. We all want to win. But bigger than that is that she sees that she is having an impact on these girls, too. When the Savannah Rosses and the other girls come back and they still love Molly, that’s the real meaning behind it all, having an impact on the girls.”
Having an impact on Polk County girls – as well as feeding her program – helped Hill and a group of parents launch Polk County Volleyball Club. Modeled after larger travel programs, the goal was to give local players a club-like experience without club-like costs. Hill and Corhn have coached PCVC teams, as did Claussen at one point. Nearly every member of last year’s state championship roster played for PCVC at some point.
PCVC also began its Academy program, designed to introduce young players to the sport and give them their first taste of competition. Some 50 to 60 girls took part last winter in Academy, and combine that with the number of players in Polk County YMCA’s program and the large rosters at Polk County Middle and PCHS this season and it’s obvious that the sport has taken hold in the area.
Just as Hill hoped.
“The high school feeds so much off the success and the buildup that we have through PCVC, both the club side of and with the Academy side,” she said. “I started playing volleyball when I was eight. If we can get these kids in here and falling in love with the sport in a way that they choose it, and it’s not forced on them, then let’s do that.
“Let’s make volleyball the sport that every girl wants to play. We’ve got a packed-out gym, and we’ve got a JV team with a full roster, and we’ve got a varsity with a full roster, and we’ve got player managers, and I’m just here for all of it. Let’s have as much interest as we can and get the kids playing this sport. That’s how it was where I came from, and I just want to build that kind of character around volleyball.”
Now what?
That’s the question that Hill has been asked almost daily since walking out of North Carolina State’s Reynolds Coliseum last November, state championship trophy in hand.
Now what?
The answer is that much remains on Hill’s to-do list.
“That was a bucket list thing, but at the same time, it motivates me,” she said. “Just to try to do it again, to try to get back there. How many times can we get there? What can I do with this group? What does the future look like?
“That’s more of what I focus on. At the beginning of this season, especially, every person I talked to made some reference to last year and that group of six studs (last year’s seniors), and they were studs, and we owe so much of our success to them. But it got to the point where I was like, they aren’t here anymore. They are all moving on with their lives to bigger and better things.”
Polk County enters Saturday’s match with a 14-11 record. Whatever the final won-loss total is, it will be the second lowest of her Wolverine tenure, and she will face saying goodbye to a group of eight seniors.
That may spell a rebuilding effort anywhere else. Hill doesn’t see it that way.
“We have a large group of underclassmen. We have a large group of eighth graders coming up that just had a really successful season,” she said. “Those are all things that I look at and say that the future for us still looks really bright. The opportunities are still definitely there.”
The other question Hill often encounters is how long she’ll be around Polk County to lead those opportunities. The Wolverines’ success has brought other schools around to see if Hill might be interested in replicating her formula elsewhere, many of them larger schools in larger areas. She has said no to all. She expects to keep doing so.
“I’m really happy here,” she said. “I really like who I work with, I really like who I work for. I like the motto of this place and these people. I’m not going anywhere.
“I feel like I have started something and I don’t want to walk away from it. I want to keep building. I’ve had a lot of opportunities given to me here, and I really appreciate that. Though I’m flattered and very appreciative of every opportunity, I’m happy where I am. I’m just ready to keep working and building and seeing what all we can do.”
And that’s what Bill Miller and Jeff Wilson hoped for 12 years ago when they made the decision to hire an unproven 22-year-old to lead Polk County’s volleyball program.
“The wins are great, but it’s all the other stuff that Coach Hill has brought to that program, to girls and families, that’s what has been wonderful for this community,” Miller said.
“Sometimes you’re wrong, sometimes you’re right. In this case, we made a pretty good decision.”
