By Michael Errigo
COLLEGE PARK, Md. – The Maryland volleyball team got a brief look at what they hope their future will hold on Sunday as they faced off against perennial powerhouse No. 14 Purdue (14-2, 4-0 Big Ten) in a 3-1 loss (26-24, 20-25, 16-25, 16-25).
Under head coach Dave Shondell, the Boilermakers have transformed from a Big Ten bottom-feeder to consistent NCAA contender, and serve as a good model for Maryland head coach Steve Aird and his squad.
“They've developed a really good program, so for me it's a really good template of how to take a program from not being nationally relevant to being relevant,” said Aird.
When Shondell became the fourth-ever Purdue volleyball coach in February 2003, the team had just gone 89-154 under their previous two coaches combined. Shondell had previously spent 22 years as a club and high school coach in central Indiana, and looked to take his success to the collegiate level. In 12 seasons since then, Shondell has posted a 251-133 record and Purdue is one of only seven teams nationally to have made seven Sweet Sixteen appearances in the last nine seasons. His complete coaching staff is the longest tenured in the Big Ten and the school has ranked in the top-20 national attendance average every year since 2003.
“If you look in the Big Ten, you can't find many programs that have been in dead last and then risen to where they're going to the Elite Eight and the Sweet Sixteen. We have done something special, but we're not where we need to be,” said Shondell. “What [Aird] is doing right now, I'm still doing. It's just at a different level and in a different manner.”
Shondell's success did not come overnight, as flipping a program is particularly hard in the Big Ten.
“The toughest thing is, you can do a great job and it may not show because everybody [in the Big Ten] is doing a great job. If you're starting at the bottom, it's a climb,” he said. “It's about believing in not the results but what's getting done every day in the gym. Are you working harder than everybody else in the country, are people shocked when they play you because that wasn't who they saw last year, things like that.”
Aird hopes this season is the beginning of a turnaround much like Purdue's, one that can take the Terps from a fledgling team in a new landscape to a big time, Big Ten power.
“Steve's wired differently. He's got big time vision and he loves a challenge,” said Terps assistant coach and recruiting director Kristin Kenney.
Aird approached Kenny, who was an assistant coach and the recruiting director at UConn, along with assistant coach Adam Hughes, the director of volleyball operations at Penn State, to embark on this College Park project with him.
“[Aird] basically brought me on campus and he said we're sitting here looking at a top-20 school eight miles from the White House with a beautiful campus in the best volleyball conference in the country. Tell me why we can't win?” recalled Kenney. “It's great when you get to work for a guy like that with such a big vision but he's really, really smart and he understands how to get where he needs to go. He has the blueprint of how to get there.”
With one eye on the present and a team that won a set against a nationally ranked squad Sunday afternoon, the team keeps the other on the future. Even in instances like today, when the Terps go down, other factors play an important role in painting the bigger picture.
“As coaches, losing is always tough and you never want to lose, you never want to settle. But our goal is the process, so we're really focusing on training, we're focusing on getting players better at what they can do and then just recruiting,” said Kenney.
“We're focused on building something here that is going to stay,” added Kenney. “We want to be one of the best programs in the country, one of the best student sections in the country and one of the best teams in the country and [Aird's] vision is for all of that. So, the hard work is not the scary part, that's the fun part.”
Michael Errigo, a sophomore journalism major at the University of Maryland, is a contributing writer to umterps.com.
