COMING UP ACES
The team, which took the court for the first time in the fall of 1974, has won more than 1,200 matches, including 750 at the NCAA Division I level, with 15 conference championships in three different leagues and nine NCAA Tournament appearances.
“I think about how far women’s athletics and the volleyball program has come in the last 50 years,” says Coach Jason Kepner, who has been with the program for 18 seasons.
In 1974, just two years after the U.S. Congress passed Title IX ensuring equality for men’s and women’s collegiate athletics, Nancy Wilson was coaching volleyball at Garrett High School when the women’s athletic director at the College, Joan Cronan, approached her about starting a women’s volleyball team. Wilson assembled a team on a shoestring budget that was immediately competitive.
“We took a lot of basketball players and converted them into volleyball players,” says Wilson, who spent a decade as coach. “We were very athletic and wanted to play the game the right way. The winning culture was there almost from the beginning.”
In those early days, the players and coaches would routinely pile into a 15-person van for the long road trips around the Southeast. “The van would break down more often than not, and we’d spend a night on the side of the highway waiting for someone to help us out,” chuckles Wilson, who left in 1984 to coach basketball at the University of South Carolina. Amelia Dawley, Laura Lageman and Jewel McRoberts built on her legacy.
“Those early teams did so much to put this program in the position that it is today,” says Kepner. “Each coach brought something different to the program.”
Then came Sherry Dunbar-Kruzan, who compiled an eye-popping 113-22 record during her four seasons (2003–06). In 2005, led by CofC Hall of Fame inductee Tiffany Blum ’08, the Cougars were 32-2 and had a perfect 18-0 mark in the Southern Conference. The Cougars would go on to defeat North Carolina in the opening round of the NCAA tournament – the first postseason tournament victory in school history.
Says Kepner, who took over the program in 2007 after Dunbar left for Indiana: “I just didn’t want to screw up what Sherry and the other coaches had built.”