Jennifer Neilson enters her eighth season as York women's volleyball head coach in 2025-26. In the 2024-25 season, Neilson led the Lions to a 10-10 season and narrowly missed the playoffs, finishing 9th in the OUA.
She joined the Lions coaching staff in 2018 and is the sixth coach in program history. Over her tenure at York, she has guided the team to four playoff appearances and one playoff win, a five-set road victory over the McMaster Marauders in the 2023 OUA quarter-finals – the program’s first postseason triumph since the 2013 OUA semi-final over Toronto.
Neilson began coaching at an elite level while attending the University of Toronto, as she spent time as an assistant coach with Team BC’s 16U women’s team in 2013 and became an assistant coach with the Team Ontario 18U team in 2014. After graduating from U of T with a bachelor of kinesiology in 2015, she became an assistant coach for the women’s volleyball team at the University of Windsor while she completed her master’s in human kinetics. Most recently, she’s been a head coach with the Halton Region Volleyball Club, Team Ontario’s 16U women’s team, and worked with the OVA as high-performance coordinator and apprentice coach.
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Neilson is also well-rounded at the administrative level, having developed and managed programming for the OVA’s high-performance plan and lead their high-performance athlete identification process.
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As a star outside hitter with the Varsity Blues, Neilson was named to the OUA all-star team three years in a row from 2013-15 and was named to the CIS national championship all-star team in 2015. The Port Coquitlam, B.C., native was also a two-time academic all-Canadian, and attended Volleyball Canada selection camps for the senior A team in 2014 and the FISU Games team in 2015.Â
