Kim Yeon-koung and the retirement that never quite took

Kim Yeon-koung

Photo: 매맞는고참 / CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	February 26, 1988 Ansan
Occupation	Volleyball Player
Individual awards	Olympic Games MVP and top scorer · CEV Champions League winner and MVP · V-League champion · V-League Finals MVP · V-League Regular Season MVP (seven times) · Asian Games gold medal · Volleyball World Best Player of 2021 · MBC Entertainment Awards Female Rookie Award (2025)

Kim Yeon-koung has said goodbye to volleyball so many times that the word has stopped meaning much. She left the national team after losing an Olympic bronze-medal match, left Istanbul with flowers, a plaque and a framed shirt, and walked off the court in her home arena in Incheon holding the championship trophy and the finals MVP award she had spent years chasing. Each exit was meant to be the last, and each has put her in front of another group of players who need her to tell them what to do. The latest is the team on MBC’s Rookie Coach Kim Yeon-koung, which exists because a television network wanted to see whether South Korea’s most famous athlete could build a club out of nothing.

Inside the sport, the harder question has always been what Korean volleyball does without her. For most of two decades, opposing coaches prepared for South Korea with one instruction, stop Kim, and often lost anyway. “We focused only on blocking Kim Yeon-koung and cared less about the other aspects,” the Serbia coach Zoran Terzić said after she had torn through his team almost single-handed at the London Olympics.

Kim grew up in Ansan, the Gyeonggi city where she was born on 26 February 1988, and took up volleyball in the fourth grade because her eldest sister played. In middle school she was shorter than 170 centimetres and thought about switching to football. At Hanil Women’s High School she grew more than 20 centimetres and moved from setter and libero to outside hitter, which explains the unusual part of her game: an attacker who had learned to pass and defend first.

Heungkuk Life took her with the first pick of the 2005 V-League draft, and her debut season brought every individual prize the league had to give, from rookie of the year to regular-season and finals MVP. The club won the title that season, again in 2006-07 and again in 2008-09. Between those trophies she had four knee operations in four years, the start of a habit that has followed her since: playing through injuries that doctors wanted treated first.

In 2009 she became the first Korean woman to leave the V-League for a professional club abroad, joining JT Marvelous in Japan, who won the 2010-11 V.Premier League with her as MVP. Fenerbahçe signed her in 2011, and in her first European season the Istanbul club won its first CEV Champions League with Kim as the first Asian player named the competition’s MVP. That summer in London South Korea finished fourth, and she was still voted the Olympic tournament’s MVP and top scorer, with a record 207 points. Two Turkish league titles followed, then Shanghai and Eczacıbaşı VitrA.

London also opened the ugliest fight of her career. Heungkuk argued that she was still its player, having spent only four seasons in the Korean league, two short of free agency; Kim counted her loan years abroad and said her contract had expired. The Korea Volleyball Association sided with the club and publicly listed her as a player who had walked out on her team, and Heungkuk sent official bodies a document accusing her of abusing her popularity. She threatened to quit the national team. It took FIVB rulings, the last in early 2014, to leave the club with no claim on her. The story is usually told as a star beating a stubborn employer, and that is mostly fair. It also showed how completely Korean women’s volleyball had arranged itself around one person, with no plan for the day she stopped. For the national team that day came after Tokyo, where Korea beat world No. 4 Turkey in a five-set quarter-final, then lost to Brazil and Serbia and finished fourth again. Within days she confirmed her international retirement. In the Volleyball Nations League of 2022 and 2023, South Korea lost all 24 of its matches.

She had already come home in 2020, saying she wanted to prepare for the Olympics alongside her national team-mates. That first season back fell apart when the Lee twins, her team-mates at Heungkuk, were suspended over school-bullying allegations, and the Pink Spiders lost the final to GS Caltex. After another year in Shanghai she returned in 2022. The Pink Spiders led Korea Expressway two games to none in the 2022-23 final, then lost three in a row. A year later Hyundai E&C Hillstate beat them in the final. She was regular-season MVP four times in five years, and three times the award sat beside an empty space where the championship should have been.

In February 2025 she announced that the season would be her last. Heungkuk finished first, went two games up on the Jung Kwan Jang Red Sparks in the final and, as in 2023, lost the next two. In the fifth game, at Samsan World Gymnasium on 8 April 2025, she scored 34 points, the Pink Spiders won in five sets and she was named finals MVP, her fifth V-League title nearly two decades after the first. The farewells ran for months, ending in October when Heungkuk retired her No. 10 at the next season’s opener.

She had prepared the ground for a life on screen: a YouTube channel started in 2019 made her the first volleyball player with more than a million subscribers. In September 2025 MBC launched Rookie Coach Kim Yeon-koung, in which she built the Pilseung Wonder Dogs from released professionals and players looking for one more chance. At the MBC Entertainment Awards that December she took the female rookie award, a best-couple prize with her player Inkushi and a share of entertainer of the year. Three Wonder Dogs, Lee Na-yeon, Pyo Seung-ju and Gu Sol, went on to sign with professional clubs. She also joined the staff of Kian’s Bizarre B&B for its second season on Netflix, and ended up running the kitchen of a snowbound mountain inn when Kian84 fell ill.

The second season of Rookie Coach Kim Yeon-koung, which began on 11 October 2026, raised the stakes: launch the Wonder Dogs as an eighth women’s professional club or dissolve them. MBC has opened a volleyball operations office and consulted the Korea Volleyball Federation, but no owner has signed. After a five-set win over Shujitsu High School, the strongest high-school side in Japan, in the episode broadcast on 25 October, she told the producers she would refuse a third season and never coach again. Then she added that a match like that, with no script, is the reason people watch sports.

Her next appearance is in Osaka, where she is among the presenters at the MAMA Awards on 20 and 21 November. Whether the Wonder Dogs find an owner is the question the rest of the season has to answer. As for her promise never to coach again, her record suggests reading it the way her teams have learned to read her retirements.

Tags: sports, athletes, Fenerbahçe, Kian's Bizarre B&B, Kian84, Kim Yeon-koung