Since being hired as College of San Mateo’s volleyball coach in July, Katie Goldhahn has spent the last six months or so putting together a coaching staff and hitting the recruiting trail hard.

But there has been so much more for the former Stanford standout. Goldhahn is still about a year away from taking the court for real for the Bulldogs’ inaugural season.

“I just dove right into recruiting,” said Goldhahn, who was a four-year player at Stanford from 2002 to 2005, and was a member of the Cardinal’s 2004 national championship team and a 2005 team captain.

“The high school season was good, but volleyball is recruited out of the club season.”

Goldhahn is well plugged into that scene as well. She first started coaching club volleyball while a junior at Stanford and since graduating has been involved in a number of club programs in both the Bay Area and in the Central Valley.

Goldhahn was a 2002 graduate of Tokay High School in Lodi.

But player acquisition and coaching is but a small part of Goldhahn’s job right now. She has to work on every aspect of putting together a new program from scratch — from putting up a team page on the school’s website, to putting together a class curriculum for the team, as well as other programs she teaches as part of the school’s kinesiology department.

“This was an opportunity to create something from the ground up. You’re not walking into anyone’s (established) program. It’s a unique opportunity that doesn’t come around a lot,” Goldhahn said.

And she is quickly finding out that she is not on an island.

“I have to say, Andreas (Wolf, CSM athletic director) has been a huge support system for me. He’s taken on the program as his baby and he wants it to succeed,” Goldhahn said. “The other coaches have taken me in (as well) and been so helpful.”

Goldhahn is also putting together a coaching staff that will help ease the transition as well. She has already tabbed Jillian Lontayao as one of her assistants and also announced the hiring of Aimee Rose as well.

Lontayao was a volleyball and softball star in the Sacramento area, earning a full-ride softball scholarship to Sacramento State. In 2005, she was hired by the Northern California Volleyball Association as an executive assistant and league/tournament coordinator. In 2010, she was hired as the program/operations director at the Foundry Sports Facility, home to the Encore club program.

Rose is wrapping up her studies at Grand Canyon University in Arizona, where she served as a utility player for the Antelopes.

“[Rose] can understand and relate to the kids coming in,” Goldhahn said. “I think we have a very well-versed staff.”

Rose said she jumped at the opportunity to begin her coaching career. Rose said she trained with Goldhahn as a high school player and developed a bond with her new boss even then.

“I’ve known [Goldhahn] for six, seven years. She came to be this mentor role to me,” Rose said. “She is someone I look up to.”

Goldhahn said she has who she thinks are a core group of players who are committed to being on the court when the team debuts for the 2016 campaign and that the main goal of the program is two-fold: one is to make sure her players are eligible to transfer to four-year schools once they are done at CSM, and two, to run the Bulldogs like a Division I program.

“We just need to get the word out [about the program],” Goldhahn said. “I have this core group of three or four girls who have committed and are giving me leads.”