It’s easy to assume volleyball has always been Charlie Wade’s game, considering his unwavering passion for the sport, and that he was born in Redondo Beach, Calif.

But then there’s this part of his bio that makes you wonder: The coach of the reigning national champion University of Hawaii Rainbow Warriors graduated from high school in Warsaw, Ind., a town of around 10,000 people about midway between Chicago and Indianapolis, a few miles away from Notre Dame.

“No one played volleyball,” Wade said Tuesday, after it was announced he’d been named Big West Coach of the Year in the wake of UH’s third conference championship in four years Saturday. “Well, actually we did play a version at family gatherings. There was a beer rule. If you had a beer in your hand you could let the ball bounce before you hit it. It was a different game than ours now.”

Wade’s family moved from southern California to Fort Worth, Texas, then to Detroit and Chicago before settling in Warsaw. Wade, the youngest of four siblings, was there from fifth grade to high school graduation.

“This was Indiana, where every driveway has a basketball rim. So, of course, I played some basketball,” he said. “I played some golf, and had a job at a golf course when I was 12 or 13.”

But baseball was his favorite.

“I played a ton of it,” he said. “Center field, second base, catcher.”

Wade’s original post-high school plan was to go to college at Indiana University and major in business, perhaps follow his father’s path in sales.

Then one Saturday afternoon, he was watching ABC’s “Wide World of Sports” — that long-running bastion of fringe sports that covered everything from demolition derby to rattlesnake hunting.

“I’m watching from snow-filled Indiana, and it’s the world championships of beach volleyball,” Wade said. “And it was at Redondo Beach. I was, ‘Hey, wait a minute, that’s me! That’s where I was born, I gotta get there!’ ”

Wade convinced a friend to drive with him to California. Wade was going to enroll at Long Beach State, but all the classes he wanted were filled, so he started out at Long Beach City College instead. One of his first classes was volleyball.

“It was outdoors, on the asphalt,” he said. “I was athletic and could jump, so it was fun. A couple of years later, in 1983 I got into coaching,” he said.

Wade forgot all about golf, basketball and even baseball. He changed his major to kinesiology because it related to volleyball more than business did.

“You could say I was obsessed,” he said.

Wade found a high school where the athletic director let him coach all six teams — boys and girls freshman, junior varsity and varsity — by himself.

“I needed the money,” he said. “And I got the keys to the gym, and was allowed to coach the club team I started. That’s how the Magnum Volleyball Club got started.

“If you go by the 10,000 hours rule, I was on the right path. I was logging a lot of hours.”

One of Wade’s early players in the 1980s was a future All-American and Olympian. He knew Teee Williams before she added the third “e” to her name, and before she starred at UH.

Williams’ matriculation to Manoa was part of a growing relationship between Wade and legendary UH women’s coach Dave Shoji. He came to Hawaii to join Shoji’s staff in 1995.

“It was totally because of volleyball. I’d first come here while I was at Fullerton (from where he graduated and had his first college assistant coaching job). It was the Klum Gym days.”

From 2006 to 2008 Wade was the women’s head coach at Pacific, and was hired to coach the Warriors in 2010.

After winning seasons his first two years, UH went 7-20 and 11-17 in 2012 and 2013. It’s been a fairly steady upward arc to the top since. Wade said the losing seasons taught him two things.

“One is that when you’re managing a roster with 4 1/2 scholarships you can’t afford to make any mistakes. With 12, with the women, you can make some mistakes,” he said. “Two, the buy-in is everything. You have to have a clear message and get everyone to buy in, and not just in theory. If I’m driving the bus, I’ve got to figure out who to let on on the bus, where they sit on the bus, and sometimes who is going to have to get off the bus.”