The phone rang at 12:15 a.m. Dillon Klein, a high school junior in Pacific Palisades sleeping off another club volleyball weekend, picked up. On the other end was Jeff Nygaard, the head coach of USC men’s volleyball team, calling the moment the NCAA recruiting window opened. After the call, Klein went back to sleep, but something had shifted. Two weeks later, the seventeen-year-old kid who’d been pretty set on UC Santa Barbara committed to the Trojans. He hasn’t second-guessed it once.
That first midnight phone call now feels like the opening line of a story that has unfolded with unusual richness. Klein, a 6-foot-6 outside hitter from a family of elite athletes, is in his final semester as a Trojan.
“It’s been the best experience, like, ever,” Klein said. “From playing on the court, being in class, the social life — it was unreal.”
Going into the 2026 postseason, Klein, a four-time all-conference selection, is second in both the MPSF and NCAA with 4.10 kills per set and 4.82 points per set. He was named a first-team AVCA All-American as a junior and is a semifinalist for the AVCA National Player of the Year award this season. He has registered double-digit kills in 80 career matches, scoring 20 kills or more in 13 of them. Over his four years as a Trojan, Klein has powered down 1,373 kills, demolished 80 service aces and put up 249 total blocks.
The numbers are extraordinary. The story behind them requires more than a stat sheet.
THE NAME ON THE BACK
To understand Dillon Klein the volleyball player, it helps to understand Dillon Klein the heir.
His grandfather, Bob Klein, played tight end at USC from 1966 to 1968, was part of the Trojans’ 1967 national championship team and was a first-round pick of the Los Angeles Rams. His father, Jimmy Klein, played both football and volleyball at Stanford.
His aunt, Kristin Keefe, was a four-time volleyball All-American at Stanford and the 1991 National Player of the Year, later competing in the 1996 Olympics for the United States. His uncle, Adam Keefe, was an All-American basketball player at Stanford, drafted by the NBA’s Atlanta Hawks. His cousins played Stanford volleyball on three NCAA championship teams. The Trojan family pride continues with his cousin Kerry Keefe, who’s in her graduate year with USC beach volleyball after being a 2024 AVCA East Coast All-Region Team Honorable Mention during her time at Duke’s indoor program.
The Klein-Keefe family tree reads like a Hall of Fame waiting list.
“It’s obviously made me a huge competitor,” Klein said. “Everything I do is pretty much competitive. They’ve been some of the best mentors to me I could ever ask for.”
The advice that he said stuck most came from his father and grandfather, both football players who told him that whatever pain he felt on a volleyball court was nothing compared to the contact they absorbed. It was a calibration that gave Klein a longer fuse than most. On the court, he plays with the composure of someone who’s been told, repeatedly, that things can always be harder.
“Focus on the mental aspect,” Klein recalled them telling him. “It’s the one thing you can control. Just always want to win that next point, whatever it is, and try and play your ass off every single time you get on the court.”
TERMINAL
Ask Klein how he’d describe his playing style in a single word, and he’ll give a straight response.
“Terminal,” he said. “Your ball’s gonna go down — whether it’s our point or their point, that’s up to me — but most likely it’s gonna end.”
It is an apt self-assessment. Klein attacks with a combination of raw athleticism and accumulated precision that his setter, junior Caleb Blanchette, has had a front-row seat to for three seasons. Over that time, Blanchette has learned something that changes how a setter operates: No matter how bad the set, Klein can score with it.
“He can do anything with any ball that I set,” Blanchette said. “It can be a bad ball, and he’ll go score still. There aren’t many people in the country who can do it. It gives me so much confidence to send the ball wherever.”
Blanchette himself is a 2025 AVCA All-America Honorable Mention and has dished out 2,749 career assists.
The mechanics of their partnership go beyond raw talent. Blanchette credits three years of daily repetition — and a friendship that extends well off the court, including regular rounds of golf at the Los Angeles Country Club — for their near-telepathic connection.
Against UC Irvine in February, Klein put together back-to-back performances of 24 and 23 kills while hitting a combined .393. Blanchette set him up with his own season high 57 and 53 assists.
“That trust built up over the three years,” Blanchette said. “You kind of just become one in that space.”
Head coach Jeff Nygaard identifies Klein’s blocking as a dimension that may not get its due in the national conversation.
“I think he’s one of the best area-for-area blockers in the nation,” Nygaard said. “There are times where it’s literally just Dillon, one-on-one, and I’m good with that. There have been times where a first-team All-American just gets shut down.”
Klein himself, when asked about his favorite part of his game, bypasses the kills. “Hitting pipes,” he said — out-of-system back-row attacks where he can see the whole block in front of him.
“The ball is in front of me. I get to see the block and I can hit it pretty much as hard as I can a lot of the time,” said Klein.
His approach to the game has shifted meaningfully over four years. As a freshman, he said, his instinct was to punish every ball as hard as possible. He has since learned to read defenses, take pace off when the situation calls for it, and protect his body by choosing smarter angles. The result: A hitting percentage that climbed from .272 as a freshman to .303, .355, and now .369 — among the best marks in the country.
“I made a push toward being more efficient,” Klein said. “I remember coming in just trying to put balls to the floor as hard as I could. I’ve taken a step back and looked at alternative ways to score a point.”
THE DOCUMENT ON THE WALL
Nygaard is careful about the framing when he talks about Klein’s legacy. Yes, the jump. Yes, the arm. But the coach circles back, again and again, to something harder to quantify.
“He jumps 40-plus [inches] and has a cannon for an arm,” Nygaard said. “But what you don’t see is how the team represents itself, how it operates, and that’s stemmed from what his work has been behind the scenes.”
Last year, Klein and Israeli national team veteran Guy Genis, a former intelligence officer who had been on championship programs, sat down together and wrote a document for the USC program. Not a mission statement. Not a poster with a slogan. A comprehensive, wall-to-wall blueprint for how the team would operate: in practice, in the locker room, in conversations, in how they prepared. The habits that would have to become automatic if a national title was going to be something more than an aspiration.
“It’s easy to write down on a piece of paper, ‘This is what we want to be,’ or, ‘We want to win a national title,’” Nygaard said. “But what are the habits you have to adopt every single day so that that becomes reality? That’s where those guys last year and Dillon this year have been the driver.”
Senior outside hitter Riley Haine, one of Klein’s closest friends and a four-year teammate and roommate, sees the same thing in how Klein moves through a team environment.
“He likes to use a little bit of force, but he also keeps it very mellow at times,” Haine said. “He’s very composed. He won’t lash out too often, but when it does happen, it’s very reasonable. We see him as the captain. We really respect what he says.”
Klein’s own description of his leadership is almost comically understated.
“I just like to play the game and be on a team,” he said. “Sometimes my mouth starts running, and if they think what I’m saying is good, then I’m all for it.”
What the mouth says, though, matters. Blanchette recalled Klein’s evolution from a player who competed hard to one who understood how to communicate, giving criticism from a place of wanting everyone on the roster to succeed.
“He’s gotten so mature,” Blanchette said. “He does a lot of leading by example because he is such a hard worker. His criticism doesn’t come from, ‘I’m talking down to you.’ It comes from, ‘I want to see everyone on our team be better.’”
Part of Klein’s role this year has been the deliberate integration of freshmen into the program’s culture, not as subordinates running errands, but as teammates on equal footing from day one.
“Our freshmen are going to compete for us,” Nygaard said. “So this isn’t a freshman situation. It’s, sit down at a team meal and there are your senior guys with the freshmen. They’re on equal footing.”
Klein has tried to give younger players something specific: an understanding of urgency.
“I am the old guy now,” he said. “I remember being a freshman thinking, ‘I’ve got three more years, whatever.’ Now, this is coming to an end. You’ve got to get after it.”
He’s tried to teach teammates like sophomore libero Johnny Dykstra and others to internalize what a senior feels: that this window, right now, is the one that matters.
JANUARY 7
The USC men’s volleyball team was finishing practice when the news started flooding in. It was Jan. 7, 2025 — the morning the Palisades Fire ignited the coast of Southern California. Klein, who grew up in the Pacific Palisades, immediately thought of his family. His parents. His grandparents. His aunts, uncles, cousins. All three generations still lived in the same neighborhood.
“I saw it on the news right when we got out of practice,” Klein said. “I was like, ‘Oh, another one of these.’ We had so many fires growing up in that area, and they never turned out to be much. And then the story just kept lingering.”
He started calling. Parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles. Then the evacuation notices came and he was glued to the television. His grandparents went back to retrieve his cousin’s dogs while the fire burned below them. In a moment of intense stress, the wind shifted. They made it out in time. Then, around 10 or 11 p.m., his phone buzzed with a notification: the glass had broken in his family’s house.
“Game over,” he said quietly.
Klein’s family lost its home. His grandparents lost theirs. His uncle stood outside with a fire hose and saved his home. That house was also where Klein’s father and aunt had grown up, and it became a shelter for the extended family. Klein’s grandparents moved in. Three generations in the one structure that survived.
When asked if he’d considered not playing in the days that followed, Klein barely let the question finish. “Absolutely not,” he said. “That was out of the question.”
He later learned that Princeton, USC’s opponent that week, had raised concerns about the game, worried not only about the air quality but also about Klein’s mental health.
Klein heard about it. His response was unambiguous.
“There’s no way these guys are going to cancel this game,” he said. “We were going to beat them and we needed to win.”
Princeton agreed to play and USC won. Klein posted 14 kills and hit an even .400. That performance doubled in this year’s matchup against the Tigers, with Klein’s season high of 27 kills and 30.5 points.
“Volleyball was the best outlet ever for me,” Klein said. “I got to come in, go into the gym, and just forget everything going on outside of it — take whatever anger and frustration I had out on the ball. It was crazy beneficial.”
He’s been back to the Palisades since. First during Easter weekend 2025, driving through with his girlfriend. The neighborhood that was once one of the most beautiful in Los Angeles was unrecognizable — ocean views where houses had stood, ash lots where neighbors had lived. What kept him from sliding into grief, he said, was the sight of construction workers building on Easter Sunday.
“That was a breath of fresh air,” Klein said. “Seeing people doing work on houses, literally on a day that the majority of the world takes off, just trying to rebuild the community I grew up in.”
He has since returned to play beach volleyball at the Bel-Air Bay Club, on the sand just down the hill from where his childhood home stood.
The community of Manhattan Beach, where his family relocated, welcomed them without hesitation.
“They just opened their arms,” Klein said.
He paused, then offered a wider perspective.
“The Altadena fire was a lot worse than the Palisades fire,” said Klein. “People were having their insurance canceled before the ash had even settled. I’m grateful to be in the spot I’m in. It could have been worse.”
WHAT COMES NEXT
The questions about Klein’s future are everywhere: professional leagues in Europe, the U.S. national team, a business career, a return to the sport as a coach someday. He deflects most of them with the same answer, offered without impatience.
“I don’t know what I’m doing next year,” Klein said. “I don’t know what life brings. I’m putting my fishing pole in a lot of different ponds, seeing what fish I can catch.”
Nygaard understands the position his senior is in and frames it as a privilege that cuts both ways. Klein has legitimate potential pathways in volleyball, in business, and in life that most athletes at any level don’t. That abundance of options, Nygaard noted, is itself a kind of pressure.
“Here’s this path, this path, or this path and that means you have to make a decision,” Nygaard said. “But I would always prefer that to ‘my only opportunity is that.’”
Klein doesn’t frame it as a dilemma.
“I’ve been a volleyball player my whole life, ever since I can remember,” he said. “I am excited for a new chapter.”
He is, however, careful to leave the timing of that chapter open.
UNFINISHED BUSINESS
For Klein, the work isn’t done. The senior plainly admits that he is not yet content with his career.
USC finished the 2026 regular season in third place in the MPSF standings after losing to No. 1 UCLA and No. 2 Pepperdine. The national championship — USC has not won one during his tenure — remains the only thing Klein says is truly on his mind.
“We’ve been grinding since August,” he said. “Missing out on a ton of stuff outside of volleyball, just to be in the gym and focus on the next day. Winning MPSF, winning a national championship, that is the only thing on my mind.”
He believes it can happen. And Nygaard, who considers Klein among the three most outwardly competitive players he has ever coached, alongside former Trojans Micah Christenson and Tony Ciarelli, believes the infrastructure Klein helped build may outlast him by years.
“There’s the document now,” Nygaard said. “The next version of leadership will be built off of that. Of course they’ll have their own way of doing it. But if it doesn’t have 99 percent of that — we need to make sure there’s continuity.”
Haine, who has watched Klein play, lead and quietly put the program on his back through fires literal and figurative, offers the simplest summary of what he leaves behind.
“Dillon’s a freak athlete,” Haine said. “He uses his ability to see the court and jump so high to make smart swings. Very composed on the court. Overall, great player.” He stopped, then added, “Great guy, too. Even better person.”
Klein was asked, near the end of a long conversation, what he wants people to see when they think of him.
He didn’t mention kills. Didn’t mention awards. His first answer was an institution.
“SC logo, for sure,” Klein said. “I’ve given a lot of time, effort, blood, sweat, and tears to this program. I just want people to know that I put my time in here.”
He paused, then offered what he wants his teammates to carry with them.
“Hopefully a good friend,” he said. “Good teammate, good player. I hope they take what I tell them and go teach it to other people.”
He has one more opportunity with USC as the Trojans head to the MPSF and NCAA tournaments in the coming weeks. Maybe more after that, if the allure of going pro or the U.S. men’s national team grows stronger. But right now, there is a gym in Los Angeles, a team that believes in itself, and a senior outside hitter who, by his own description, sends the ball down every time it touches his hands.
Terminal. Win or lose, it ends.
He wouldn’t have it any other way.