UNIVERSITY PARK — In the late hours of last Thursday, there was a flurry of activity in State College.

Penn State apparently had its new football coach in town, rumors were being chased from University Drive to Foxborough, Mass., and actual facts were in short supply.

He may have been on the search committee to find the new coach, but at the time Russ Rose was hardly in the middle of the action.

He was in France, watching from afar as so many people chased their tails.

“I was out of the country and people were asking me what was going on,” the Nittany Lions women’s volleyball coach said. “I was like, ‘Hey, you guys are a lot closer to the story back in State College.’ My understanding is, the candidate’s in town. I’m in Paris.”

Rose had been in Italy attending and talking at a volleyball clinic, and also enjoying some time away with his wife Lori. They were gone more than a week, eating good food and seeing the sights in the two countries.

Thanks to modern technology, however, Rose was anything but out of the loop. With cell phones and laptops, Rose was still doing his part on the six-person search committee. He even interviewed candidates by Skype.

“I was on the Internet all the time that I wasn’t looking in some museum or something,” he said. “And I had my phone going all the time. I was getting e-mails and texts. I knew kind of what was going on.”

Messages were coming at all hours as well. Unaware of his location, the phone rang some times at 4 a.m. local time.

What had Rose amazed was the world of big-time football and how different this pursuit was compared with other searches in which he has been involved like for volleyball or basketball coaches or other administrators. Those were a lot more straight forward.

“This one was a totally different animal because of the people that you’re really dealing with,” Rose said. “There are a lot of people interested, but they’re under contract so they can’t say they’re interested so their representatives are talking. It reminded me of when kids are young and they say, ‘Hey, tell so-and-so I think she’s cute.’”

In the end, Rose was happy with the final selection of Bill O’Brien, the New England Patriots’ offensive coordinator, and it was tough to narrow the list down to one choice.

“I thought all of the great candidates we talked to had great strengths,” said Rose, who was back in town by the official announcement on Saturday. “I already knew that the Penn State football program was one of the top positions in the country and I think we’ll continue to have great success in a very important sport here at the university.”

Wrapping up the season

As for Rose’s regular job, having had a month to digest the end of his team’s season, which came up well short of winning a fifth consecutive NCAA crown, he was still brooding over things he could have done.

“I thought we got better in some areas,” Rose said, “but I never felt we had the same type of team mentality that we’ve had in the past that we’ve had a real collective fight that would allow us to do what we wanted to do and get better throughout the season. I thought we were highs and lows. I thought there were days we looked pretty good and days where we were our own worst enemy.”

The Nittany Lions were ranked in the top 10 all season, tied for second in the Big Ten, was among the top programs in attendance and had three All-Americans which was second only to USC.

“For some programs those would be the highest of highs,” said Rose, whose team lost 3-0 to eventual champion UCLA in the NCAA regional semifinals after four straight national titles. “My assessment is we underachieved. We didn’t really do as good a job as coaches and as players with the tools that we had available to us. We had some challenges, for sure, but we had some young kids and I don’t think that I was able to get the staff to have as good of an impact as I wanted and I wasn’t as happy with my ability to impact both the staff and players to get them to realize that they had a chance this year.”

As he was making these comments in his Rec Hall office, not far away in the main gym, nearly every member of the returning team had set up a net and were running through drills on their own.

Rose, who noted everyone who can return should return, was happy to know they were back to work on the court, but also inferred it was a little late to be putting forth extra effort.

“They should have listened in the beginning,” he said. “I wasn’t lying in August.

“They’re good kids, they like each other, they’re respectful,” Rose said, “they just don’t bust their (butts) to be great. Usually I can get kids to work a little bit harder. I didn’t have as much success with this group.”

He hopes the message has been received and will carry over into next season, when the roster will be a little more seasoned and the Nittany Lions can start chasing after another title.

“There were times I had three freshmen in the front row against teams with three seniors in the front row,” Rose said. “That’s a bad matchup whether we’re talking college basketball, football, volleyball — the older kids, they just know more.”

Gordon Brunskill can be reached at 231-4608.