USF beach volleyball coach resigns after team's inaugural varsity season

South Florida is looking for a beach volleyball head coach less than a month after concluding the team’s inaugural NCAA varsity season.

Pri Piantadosi-Lima resigned her position for “personal reasons,” USF CEO of Athletics Rob Higgins announced Friday.

"Family truly comes first," Piantadosi-Lima wrote Monday in an Instagram post.

Piantadosi-Lima coached the Bulls to a 21-15 record in their first varsity season, which concluded with a 3-1 loss to No. 1 seed Florida Atlantic at the Conference USA Championships in Youngsville, Louisiana.

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"Honored to have been the first," she wrote on Instagram. "Proud of the work the student athletes put to cross off lots of milestones they had as goals for this first official season. But family truly comes first."

Piantadosi-Lima and her wife, Michelle Piantadosi-Lima, the head volleyball coach at Eckerd College, became parents to a daughter in April 2024.

She was hired in 2023 to build the program from scratch. She guided the Bulls through roster development and a practice season in 2024-25 ahead of this spring’s debut.

“We will be moving forward with a national coaching search immediately,” Higgins said in a statement posted on USF’s social media.

Higgins wrote on X that “we could not be more excited” for the future of the program, which includes plans to open a lighted, six-court beach volleyball facility on campus this fall.

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“We are focused on finding the perfect leader to support and grow this special group of amazing student-athletes,” he wrote. “Our next coach will build this program into a national college beach volleyball powerhouse.”

Piantadosi-Lima, 46, a longtime Tampa Bay area resident, previously founded and owned Optimum Beach, a beach volleyball training facility in St. Petersburg. A native of Brazil, she played professionally for nearly two decades.

In her post, she wished the USF program the best.

"Thankful for those who supported and believed in me," she wrote. "Excited (and blessed) to have lots to look forward to like rejoining (Optimum Beach) and continue to prep juniors, college players and pros for their next level."