Fish Fry / Haunted Hoops Qq...

[Nukem2]

Noticed for the Fish Fry scrimmage that a complimentary ticket to the women's 6:00 volleyball game is included with registration for the Fish Fry dinner. My question is will MU let folks in for the BB scrimmage before the volleyball game is over? Have no idea how long an average volleyball match lasts...

[MUAlphaBangura]

Nuke, MU and Creighton are probably the two best Vball teams in the Big East. Could be a knock-down-drag-out match between these two. If it goes 5 sets, it could take every bit of 2 hours to complete. If it only goes 3, likely done in 1 1/2 hours. I'd recommend watching as the MU ladies are a strong, entertaining squad.

[IWB]

They have an All-American in Bisky Koberstein who I have known since she was about 6. It is a completely different game than I imagined, and no way in hell could I return 98% of the serves. (The 2% would errantly bounce off of my body in an upward fashion, then saved by someone else)

[unclejohn]

They have an All-American in Bisky Koberstein who I have known since she was about 6. It is a completely different game than I imagined, and no way in hell could I return 98% of the serves. (The 2% would errantly bounce off of my body in an upward fashion, then saved by someone else)


You might recall the glory days of Loras College volleyball, or perhaps it was before your time. As it happened, the best volleyball players in the state of Iowa all came out of Dubuque. Almost inevitably, two of the three Dubuque high schools met in the state finals every year. Lots of those girls stayed home to go to college, so Loras had a powerhouse team. When I was there, they took on the D-1 schools in the state every year and frequently beat them. This was before Title IX really kicked in, so schools like Iowa were regularly playing little NAIA schools of about 2,000. One year I was there, the team went through the regular season with two losses, one to a lower division powerhouse and one to Iowa State. They beat Iowa and a couple other D-1 schools. That year, the volleyball coach was the wife of the football coach, and being a little school, Loras did not keep football coaches long. They took off at the first opportunity for something bigger. (Brad Soderberg later got his start coaching basketball there, while Kevin O'Neil's first head coaching job was a few miles west at Mount Mercy.) But while the two of them were there, the volleyball coach built took the women's team to a new level. For the first time ever, she had the players lifting weights! Can you imagine that? Women lifting weights? A couple of the stars from the team before could no longer make the team. They had never seen coaching like that.

Of course, today it is routine. Volleyball players, like other athletes, have a strength and conditioning coach and stay in shape all year long. The rules have changed a bit since then as well, which I find a bit confusing. But the biggest change is that the players are just dramatically better. And they would have killed me when I was in college.

[TheSultan]

Great story. Who was the football coach? I was half expecting something like Mrs. Bill Belicheck or something like that...

[IWB]

I don't know that the volleyball team was that great when I was at Loras. I do remember Soderberg though. When I was there our coach was Mike Jaskulski, and his assistants were Steve Krafcisin and brad Soderberg.

Jas had a great team that he led to the DII national title game, led by Curly "Boo" Johnson from Peoria, who went on to start at PG for the Globetrotters for 17 years (retired two years ago).

Here is where it gets interesting....

Our AD was Kevin White. Kevin White left for the job at Maine. Kevin went on to be the AD at Notre Dame and now is the AD at Duke.

So when White got to Maine, he hired Jaskulski. Jas was a Milwaukee native, who went on to coach at UCF, Florida State, UAB and now I think he is at Towson.

When Jas left, Soderberg got the head job and went on to UW then SLU etc.

Krafcisin, who played fir UNC in the mid-to late 70s went on to coach at Iowa State.

We had some good coaches back then. Hell, my running back coach is now the associate head coach at USC. When Loras first came to recruit me, the two that came to Marquette High were Kevin White and Tim Van Alstyne, who went on to work with the Kansas City Chiefs and is now the AD at Western Illinois.

Now you are up to speed on some worthless tidbits about the Loras College Duhawks.

[unclejohn]

Great story. Who was the football coach? I was half expecting something like Mrs. Bill Belicheck or something like that...
I believe it was a guy named Dave Ostrander. His VB coaching wife Patti had the most perfect pair of legs I have ever seen in my life. Not sure what happened to him from there. At the time I was there, Loras did not even technically have an intercollegiate team. It was a club team. We played Marquette every year. (And things were so bad that we actually lost one year.)

Watching the women's VB team was my first experience taking women's athletics seriously. When I arrived, Loras had only been co-ed for about five years or so, and if you looked in the yearbook, the various women's teams were all made up of pretty much the same people, often wearing the same uniforms, regardless of the sport. And they were mostly heavy-set women with unusually short hair, if you catch my drift.

I lived on the lower campus, right next across from the oldest building on campus, which dated from before the Civil War, and right next to the old gym, the second oldest building on campus, and an unbelievable dump. IWB would not remember it, as it had been torn down by the time he arrived. It was a tiny little building. It was my first experience with five-foot inbound lines. You see these in some very old and very small gyms. They are too small to have room behind the baseline to inbound the ball, so there is a line drawn five feet inbounds, and defenders have to stay behind that to let the offensive player inbound. Otherwise, they would be right up in his face and he would have nowhere to go but into the wall.

The women played their games there, because the only other gym on campus had low-hanging support beams which made playing volleyball difficult. Such is the nature of small college athletics. So they played in this decrepit dump right next to our dorm. One night, a few of my friends and I, in a fit of maturity and proto-feminism, decided to go next door and make fun of the women's team, since it was more fun than studying. So we watched warm-ups, and in the middle of them, this hot blond goes up and fires the ball practically through the floor. We looked at each other as if to say, "Did she just do that?" Yeah, she did. We figured out these chicks weren't half bad. We stayed around to watch. The only seats in the place were a row of benches along one wall, some space behind the baskets, and the balcony that surrounded the floor, so most of the spectators stood on the balcony and looked down. The women acquired quite a cheering section. Guys would pour out of the dorm when they played, stand on the balcony, and scream. The next year, the football coach's wife arrived and they were really good. And unlike their predecessors, they were decidedly not of the heavy-set, short-haired persuasion.

I recall one of the players who dated one of the guys on my floor for a while. A typically lovely college-aged girl, long hair, slim figure, lovely legs, an beautiful smile, and a nice personality. During games, the fans renamed her Killer Carla. So this rather nice looking chick would come into games and guys would be shouting, "That's it Carla! Knock her teeth in!" Another player was pretty tall for a woman, a bit over six feet. She went up for a spike once, nailed an opposing player right between the eyes, and knocked her flat on her ass. The place went nuts. Most of their games were played against other small colleges. So their teams would come in, laugh at our pathetic gym, and then the women would beat the living $#!+ out of them while their fans shouted for blood from the rafters. Good times.

I am not surprised that the team had declined by the time IWB got there, and well it should. When I was there, Loras was an NAIA school that spent not very much on athletics, and wanted to spend most of it on men's basketball. They had some hope to become a D-2 power or something. That never happened. By the time IWB arrived, it had gone to D-3, which made a lot more sense. So all those talented local girls started drifting away to places where they got real scholarships, instead of a couple hundred bucks a semester a few of them got at Loras. My senior year, they lost a close, tough game to Iowa. Mind you, this is the Big Ten University of Iowa vs. a little school of under 2000 that plays its games in a shoe-box. The best player for Iowa, and on the floor, was the local girl who had gone there. Lots of the Loras players knew her, because they had played against her or with her in high school. Some local fans came to cheer her on. Loras still almost won, but the best player on the court, and some clearly better athletes, were playing for Iowa. So girls started going where they could get a scholarship, as opposed to the little college in town. Good for them. But it was fun while it lasted.

[MUBasketball]

Loras College Duhawks.

That's certainly an interesting nickname! What in the hell is a Duhawk?

[unclejohn]

Like many old college nicknames, it appears to have been invented by a radio broadcaster back in the era when colleges did not necessarily have nicknames. U of I is the Hawkeyes, of course, so when Loras took the field one day, the guy covering them on the radio referred to them as the DuHawks, for Hawks out of Dubuque. When I was there, the women's teams were informally known as the DuChicks, though they tried to avoid it. When the women's college across town, noted for what many considered the exceedingly scrupulous courting behavior of their students, decided to get a nickname for their teams, one of the suggestions was The Don't Chicks. Predictably, campus security was often referred to collectively as The DuPigs.