High school volleyball player Keli Stennes has a dilemma - stay in her little town and help bring it glory, or go to the big city for opportunities beyond her wildest dreams.

It is a thought-provoking situation and an examination of an aspiring athlete’s character - something both sports and good stories often reveal, and Stadium volleyball coach and novelist John Dillard considers himself extremely fortunate to have figured out a way to join those two great passions of his into his life.

Keli is a fictional character in Dillard’s first novel, and she appears in the next two, as well.

Dillard always knew he wanted to be a coach, since as far back has high school. Novel writing came later, but nagged at him almost as much.

“My first coaching job came when I was in high school. I never had a doubt I would bring my effort into that kind of work and that I could be successful at it. With fiction writing, it was a hunch, but I had no idea if I was any good or not. I still don’t,” Dillard said recently at a coffee shop near the high-school campus where he works.

Dillard says he has exactly the life he wants, although it did not come right out of the box.

First he was a boys high-school basketball coach and made his living writing technical manuals for auto parts. His catalogue business and his coaching brought him success. But something was lacking in both.

“I was getting a little burned out coaching the boys. Too much energy was going out toward things that had nothing to do with basketball. At the same time, my daughters were growing up and were gravitating toward volleyball. I started going to their games and I was hooked.”

Dillard was so enamored of the game, he began working his way into coaching it.

“Both the sport itself and coaching girls appealed to me. The sport is so fast and based on “teamness” because so many players touch the ball. And it can be a very complex game. Coaching girls was really different - and kind of refreshing. They seemed to have so much more pure passion for the game.”

Volleyball is the biggest girls participation sport in the country with more than 400,000 girls involved in the sport.

Dillard’s three books have dealt with the sport but also the social issues of high-school athletes. He marketed the books by traveling all over the country to tournaments, to book signings and to get the books into the hands of other volleyball coaches and people who he figured would be interested in the subject.

All three books are into three printings, which is considered very successful in the world of young-adult publishing.

The first book is titled “Can I Play?” It tracks the beginning of Keli’s high-school volleyball days. The stakes are high for the kid as she feels the pressure of her family and her peers to stay and play for her town team, despite having the talent to do big things elsewhere. The second book, “We Can Play!” and the third book, “Final Point,” complete the Keli trilogy.

Dillard’s philosophy of teaching is influenced greatly by legendary basketball coach John Wooden. All of his books use Wooden epigrams, such as, “Be more concerned with your character than your reputation, because your character is what you really are, while your reputation is merely what others think you are.”

Dillard mostly conveys in his stories his deeply felt commitment that people should not simply pursue goals but attach them to their passions.

As a writer, a parent of three daughters and a coach, he says he understands one of the most important ideas about youth - the future is in front of them and the challenges of making good decisions that will play a large role in determining their lives as adults are huge compared with their capacity for dealing with them, and this is a substantial element of his books’ themes.

As for his real volleyball players, Dillard is eager for the season to start and is looking forward to a season of great promise. He watches with more pleasure than most the maturing process of young players, a process he refers to as “teamness.”

“We have improved each of the past three years and are learning both the volleyball skills and the attitudinal stuff you need to play together as a team. I’m very competitive and I like to teach the girls to compete. But the “teamness” of this sport - that’s the part of the process that is most interesting to me.”