Problem solver: Mandeville volleyball counting on Danny Tullis’ winning touch
by William Weathers // GeauxPreps.com Contributor
The intent has always been for eight-time state championship volleyball coach Danny Tullis to remain in place and enjoy the sunset of his career.
With a career rooted in the successful Northshore region of the state, Tullis was equally happy in his first stop at Salmen as he was for the past three years at Slidell High School.
The Lady Tigers broke a 14-year stranglehold by private school powers Dominican, Mt. Carmel, and St. Joseph’s Academy and won the Division I state championship in 2024.
Their imprints on the state championship at the state’s highest level remained this season – winning the Division I state crown – where Salmen became the first public school program to repeat the highest level since Andrew Jackson in 1975.
The challenge of getting Mandeville High back to the state playoffs for the first time in three years, a program where his daughter Ansley is an assistant coach, was enough to capture the interest of the 53-year-old Tullis to become the Lady Skippers’ head coach for the 2026 season.
“I start every job thinking I’m going to be there forever,” said Tullis, who will continue coaching the WD Nation club team. “Different things happen sometimes. There’s a lot of opportunity. I want to have my family in the best opportunity available to them.”
Tullis turned the fortunes around at Slidell in a relatively short amount of time.
The Lady Tigers reached the Division I state semifinals in their first season under Tullis and ended the school’s drought of 27 years without a state title a year later. They enjoyed it so much, they went back-to-back, winning 36 times in 41 matches and were near perfect during the playoffs, claiming 15 of 16 matches, and defeated Dominican 3-0 score in the final.
Slidell was the state’s No. 1 overall-ranked team by MaxPreps.com.
“It takes a village,” said Tullis, who was 110-57 in his three seasons at Slidell. “The parents at Slidell were amazing. I had a group of special senior parents. If the parents all buy it in, then the players buy in. It doesn’t matter what school you’re at.”
Tullis, who replaces Rachel Schulingkamp, will remain a teacher at Slidell through the end of the school year. He plans to conduct volleyball-related activities at Mandeville after Jan. 1. He’ll reunite with Mandeville assistant Rachael Battistella, who assisted him at Pope John Paul and Slidell.
Mandeville last won a state championship in 2005. The Lady Skippers are also three-time state runners-up: 2004, ’06, ’15.
“It’s different,” Tullis said. “I’ve coached with all of my family. They’ve always been involved in anything I’ve done in coaching. I’ve never had an opportunity to teach with one of my kids during the day. Ainsley and I will both be teaching P.E. For me, that’s a dream job. I want to be around my family all of the time. The more time, the better it will be.
“They have a rich history of athletics, especially volleyball at Mandeville,” Tullis said. “My daughter filled me in on the strengths and weaknesses of all the individual players. We kind of have an idea of what we want to hone in on. They got hit by the injury bug a bit last year, and one player tore an ACL. We’ve got to get to the right people in the right position and also try and stay healthy.”
Tullis has won 81.6% (793-179) during a career spent at five different schools.
“I got to spend time early in my career around some really good basketball coaches,” Tullis said. “I also had some sports-minded principles. I worked with (basketball) coach (Jay) Carlin at Salmen, which some believe is the best ever. I learned a lot about practice structure and expectation levels.”
Tullis also spent time challenging LVCA Hall of Fame coach Jodie Pulizanno and Kelli Plaisca in the same district.
“They were very good volleyball minds for me to be against early, and that helped a lot,” he said.
The first six years of Tullis’s head coaching career were spent at Salmen, followed by another seven at Fontainebleau, which won the Division I state championship. He left for Pope John Paul and won five state titles over a six-year span.
Before his arrival, neither of those two programs had won state championships.
“Everywhere I’ve usually gone, it’s usually more about trying to develop the mindset first,” Tullis said. “When I come in, I think the background I have, which is growing up really poor, everything I was going to achieve was going to be an against-the-odds kind of thing. I try to bring that mentality. Let’s not settle for this or that. Learn to narrow your focus, too. We’re trying to win every single point of every single game that we play, in every single match that we play in.
“The byproduct of having that focus will be winning,” Tullis said. “We’re not going to try to win the volleyball match. We’re going to try to be exactly where we’re supposed to be the entire time, and do exactly what we’re supposed to do the entire time, and by doing that, the byproduct will be a win.”
By the time Tullis took the Slidell job, it had been 24 years since the school last climbed the top of the mountain in Division I. In the three years before his arrival, the Lady Tigers were 35-36 with one playoff win in two trips.
“I believe it’s a choice between winning and losing in high school sports,” he said. “When people ask what I mean by that, I ask what type of teammate they are and whether they’re only concerned about with how they’re teammates do? Or do you go and check the stat sheet to see how many kills you’ve got or how many points you scored? Or are you concerned with that one stat that matters, and that’s whether or not you won the game?
“You want girls to grow as much as possible as an individual for the sake of the team,” he said. “Some players want to grow as much as they can as an individual to the detriment of the team. That mentality is even more infectious than a positive mentality, and if that mentality creeps into what you’re doing, you’re going to have a hard time winning the whole thing.”
Tullis has a way of determining how each of his players is wired in that area.
“It’s about learning how to be the best teammate you can possibly be, and are you willing to do things that other people are not willing to do?” he asked rhetorically. “Are you willing to go up (to the gym) on Saturday morning at 6 o’clock because that was the only available time? Or does that cut into what you wanted to do on Friday night? When everybody buys in that manner, it’s special and it’s been special at Slidell for the last couple of years.”
Slidell’s first season under Tullis produced a 35-6 record and a trip to the state semifinals, a 3-1 loss to Dominican. The Lady Tigers (40-4) erased a 3-1 setback against Dominican during the 2024 regular season with a 3-1 victory for the state championship.
Slidell found another bit of motivation in a regular-season loss to Dominican, a three-set sweep in September, to fuel the team’s run to another state title.
The Lady Tigers won their final 11 matches of the season, complete with a 3-0 sweep over Dominican and another state crown.
Senior setter Ava Labat, who signed with Loyola-New Orleans, was voted for the Division I All-State team along with senior middle blockers Ava Barduca and Addyson Dowell.
Barduca topped the Lady Tigers with 593 kills and 145 total blocks, and Dowell, the Most Outstanding Player in the Division I state tournament, had 306 kills. Labat initiated the offense with 1,595 assists, senior Cailyn Bergeron had 127 total blocks, and senior libero Ella Kate Spilling had 606 digs, junior Emma Pippenger had 408 digs, and junior setter Lillian Simpson had 46 service aces.
“Instead of saying we can’t do this, we’ve just tried to put more time in and grind a little harder,” Tullus said. “I think I’ve carried that mentality with me everywhere I go. I don’t look at things as impossible. I look at them as problems that have to be solved.”