Final Four Team Started Spartan Renaissance
9/26/2015 12:00:00 AM | Volleyball
Grinz on Green: Â Final Four Team Started Spartan Renaissance
By Steve Grinczel, MSUSpartans.com Online Columnist
1995 Reunion Photo Gallery | Reception Video
EAST LANSING, Mich. -- As the 1995 Michigan State volleyball team came from behind to hand perennial national powerhouse Hawaii its first defeat of the season in the quarterfinals of the NCAA Tournament in Honolulu, disbelieving Rainbow Wahine fans asked themselves: "MS-Who?"
Two decades later, the college volleyball world still remembers those history-making Spartans: Courtney DeBolt, Sarah Blakely, Lindsey Clayton, Dana Cooke, Stephanie Friedlund, Robin Ill, Veronica Morales, Julie Pavlus, Kelly Penney, Andrea Pollard, Corie Richard, Val Sterk and Jenna Wrobel.
The team has reassembled, along with former Michigan State head coach Chuck Erbe, this weekend to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the program's first Big Ten championship and its only appearance in the Final Four, and to relive the memories of that improbable season.
"Oh gosh, just trying to process 20 years is a task in itself," said Cooke, now the head women's volleyball coach at George Brown College in Toronto and a developmental coach with the Canadian national beach volleyball team. "I'm not sure we can pack it all into one weekend. I wish it was a week."
"It" was as close as an internationally prominent institution with a storied Division-I athletic heritage could come to writing its own rags-to-riches "Hoosiers" story.
The Spartans languished at, or near, the bottom of the standings -- never finishing higher than seventh -- in each of its first 12 Big Ten seasons.
Erbe took over in '93, and Cooke sensed a distinct atmospheric change as the Spartans went from worst to second-from-worst under the hard-driving, yet almost mystical, new head coach.
"It was an incredible journey and such an amazing story when I tell people about it," Cooke said. "I actually just told the player I was working with on the beach yesterday -- I'm going back for my 20-year reunion, we were a Final Four team and we upset the (No. 2-ranked Hawaii) team that was supposed to blank everybody.
"I don't know if a lot of people can appreciate that Chuck built a winning program in two years, and not starting with a middle-of-the-road team. Our first goal my freshman year was to get off the bottom of the Big Ten and we did it -- we came in 10th out of 11. And my junior year, we're where we have a Big Ten ring and make the Final Four. In two years. I don't know all the stats or history, but I'm pretty sure there's no other program that can actually say they've done that."
What's more, Erbe saw greatness in the team that started with a cast of unheralded players who bonded so resolutely and demonstrated so much promise it was able to lure Wrobel, the coveted blue-chip recruit out of Naperville, Ill., away from a national field of suitors that included her second choice, UCLA.
"It was a team of, I don't want to say nobodies because we weren't, but there weren't a lot of us being sought out by other programs," Cooke said. "Chuck really saw something special in the people he chose to build the program.
"I knew I was building something, that's why I chose Michigan State. But I was not a bench-sitter and as much as I would have loved to have gone to a Penn State, I wouldn't have been OK sitting on the bench for two years. I wanted to play, that's what Michigan State could offer and that's what really appealed to me. But not for one minute did I think we would actually see that success in my four years there, because that's a very short time."
The Spartans improved from 9-22 overall and 9-15 in the Big Ten in '93 to 17-15 and 9-11, good for seventh in the league, the following season. With Cooke and DeBolt, the senior setter, as co-captains, expectations were muted in the Spartans' Jenison Field House locker room going into '95, but not in Erbe's office.
"When I sat down with him in our preseason meeting going into my junior year, he said, `We're going to win the Big Ten championship,' and in my mind I thought, You've got to be out of your bloody mind, because we had only just made it into (the NCAA) tournament for the first time in program history the year before," Cooke said. "That's the most amazing thing because I thought we were building it for 10 years down the road. But Chuck believed in it so much when we didn't."
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"We knew from the moment we stepped onto the court that we were able to trust each other and that everybody was going to give 110 percent all the time. There was a sense of a common goal to play our best."
Veronica Morales
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Erbe called the ultra-competitive Cook "the catalyst" of the team and Sterk (now Val Kemper and married to four-time Olympic triathlete Hunter Kemper) and others agree that a summer team-building trip to Japan provided the critical spark for an eclectic mix of players that included a Canadian, Morales from Argentina, a talented freshman and a core of in-state players from small towns.
Although dominated by the Japanese teams they played, the Spartans made necklaces out yen coins with holes in their center and wore them, as a constant reminder of the toughness they had developed, all the way to the national semifinal.
"The memory I have, for sure, is of just the whole building process," said Sterk, who as a junior out of Grand Rapids South Christian High became MSU's first two-time All-Big Ten selection and left in '96 as a three-time honoree and two-time All-American. "When I came in as a freshman, Chuck had these big goals for the team and a vision for changing the program around.
"I was very naïve and didn't really have those kinds of expectations. But that whole group was so special. Everybody just bought into it and worked super-hard. The trip to Kobe, Japan was such a bonding experience and a transformation for our team because we really realized we could do this together."
Erbe's ability to get the best out each player made MSU all but unbeatable in the Big Ten, which it won with a 19-1 record. The Spartans finished with an overall mark of 34-3.
"He's an amazing coach," Sterk said. "Coming in, I was a raw athlete. I wasn't this amazing volleyball player at the time, but he turned me into the player I became. But not until Jenna's class did we get the high-profile players even looking at Michigan State because the program had been so down for so many years."
After Michigan State defeated ninth-ranked Penn State to clinch a Big Ten championship, the Spartans earned a first-round bye in the NCAA Tournament and mowed down BYU in the second round at Jenison Field House. They swept San Diego State in the Mountain Region semifinal in Honolulu to set up what remains the high-water mark in program history.
Morales (now Veronica Benoit, who met and married fellow MSU graduate Timothy Benoit in Fort Lauderdale, Fla. where she teaches Spanish in the Montessori school) said the Spartans were confident going into the match against the four-time national champs in front of 10,225 fans -- six to 50 of whom, depending on estimate, were rooting for Michigan State.
"Chuck had a vision and along the way we started believing ourselves and realized how good we were when we played together," Morales said. "We knew from the moment we stepped onto the court that we were able to trust each other and that everybody was going to give 110 percent all the time. There was a sense of a common goal to play our best.
"It was kind of like a magical chemistry that happened on the court. My teammates were going to be there for me and I was going to be there for them and nothing else existed but that team. We didn't care who we had in front of us; we just wanted to execute our plan."
Things did not start well for the more physical MSU team against the quicker Wahine, who won the first two games, 15-6 and 15-8.
"I remember it was so loud," Morales said. "The floor was vibrating and we really couldn't hear each other. But we shut them down."
Wrobel (now Jenna Grave, who teaches sixth grade in Los Angeles) sat out the San Diego State match because of a month-old sprained ankle and was in the training room at intermission when a critical turning point presaged the greatest comeback in tournament history.
"I missed the big moment in Hawaii because I was getting my ankle re-taped," said Wrobel, sitting at a table in the State Room restaurant at the Kellogg Center. "Courtney gave this huge speech, it was almost like a `Rudy' moment, and she was cheering and pumping everybody up in the locker room. And I come out a little bit late and everybody's on the court, all riled up, and you could just see it in their eyes."
Michigan State fell behind 4-1 in the third game before winning 15-10, trailed 6-0 in the fourth along the way to a 15-7 victory and won the fifth, 15-7, to advance to the Final Four in Amherst, Mass.
"When they tied us at 11-11 (in the fifth game), my heart was having an out-of-body experience," Erbe, who had previously won four national championships with Southern Cal, said afterward. "I have never experienced such profound emotion in my entire career."
The Spartans lost 15-10, 8-15, 8-15, 15-9, 8-15 to No. 1-ranked and eventual national champion Nebraska in the semifinal but put MSU volleyball on a map that now has pins marking NCAA tournament milestones in 15 of the ensuing 19 seasons.
Unlike many championship teams, the '95 Spartans didn't adopt the personality of its coach.
"If anything, we rebelled that because we wanted to form our own," Wrobel said. "We were just tenacious. We just wanted to do everything right, and everything perfect, and we wanted to win and we just wanted to show everybody we could do it."
Wrobel is reminded of that team every time she looks at the MSU flag hanging in her classroom and its significance, of beginning the Renaissance Spartan teams are in the midst of today, isn't lost on her.
For example, the '95 team preceded the first of men's basketball coach Tom Izzo's seven Final Fours by three years and MSU's first BCS bowl appearance, and victory, in the Rose Bowl under Coach Mark Dantonio by 18. Women's basketball, women's cross-country, track and field, soccer, baseball, golf, rowing, field hockey have all reached new heights since.
"At the time, we were like, `Yeah, this is kinda cool, there are 6,000 people in Jenison and we're packing the house,' " Wrobel said. "Looking back, it is kind of surreal. I think, gosh, I was part of that and it was so unbelievable.
"Now, seeing your teammates again, all the memories just come flooding back."
The '95 team, was recognized with a pre-game reception and highlight video between games two and three of MSU's match against Indiana at Jenison Friday night, and will be again during Saturday's football game against Central Michigan in Spartan Stadium. Fans and alums rekindled friendships with the team during a pregame tailgate near McLane Baseball Stadium.
Meantime, Coach Cathy George, who succeeded Erbe in 2005, will continue to use it as a beacon of success for her program.
"Chuck did a great job of bringing this team together and then they trained so hard," George said. "Moving up in the Big Ten was not easy at that time, but they did it. My Western Michigan team played them in the Notre Dame tournament in '94 and you could see the chemistry and the `feel' surrounding that team.
"They were very good at every part of the game and it was no surprise to me that they changed the way volleyball was viewed at Michigan State," continued George. "It impacts us because everybody knows it as the Final Four team.
" If you were to ask them, they just were people working hard every day and for them to get to the level where they were in such a quick time. I want my team to understand that - and make 1995 "one of the Final Four teams ."
