EIU caps remarkable turnaround with first NCAA volleyball tourney trip since 2001
After chewing up and spitting out five coaches over 15 years, the women’s volleyball program at Eastern Illinois fell off a cliff in 2019. The toothless Panthers went 3-26 and 1-15 in the low-major Ohio Valley Conference with an RPI computer ranking of 314, putting them in the bottom 6.2% of NCAA Division I’s 335 […]
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After chewing up and spitting out five coaches over 15 years, the women’s volleyball program at Eastern Illinois fell off a cliff in 2019.
The toothless Panthers went 3-26 and 1-15 in the low-major Ohio Valley Conference with an RPI computer ranking of 314, putting them in the bottom 6.2% of NCAA Division I’s 335 teams.
Into that quagmire stepped Sara Thomas, embracing the challenge of flipping the script of futility in her first go at the helm of a college team.
Eastern Illinois volleyball had known painfully little success since its last appearance in the NCAA Tournament in 2001. But four years after taking on a seemingly hopeless job, Thomas has kicked EIU’s mud of losing off of her shoes.
Her Panthers won 28 of their 32 matches this year, finished first by a three-match margin in the OVC during the regular season with a 15-3 record, and roared through the conference tournament with three consecutive sweeps to earn its automatic bid to the NCAA Tournament.
Awaiting about a two-hour drive east from Charleston in West Lafayette, Indiana, is a first-round Thursday date with Marquette of the Big East Conference at Purdue’s Holloway Gymnasium. Conventional wisdom might dictate that this likely would be the final chapter in Eastern Illinois’ feel-good story, but that would overlook one salient detail: Thomas’ Panthers have a sweep of Missouri on their 2023 resume, those same Tigers out of the SEC who also earned an NCAA bid.
Missouri (17-12) has an RPI of 34. Marquette (20-10) was an at-large selection after being the regular-season Big East co-champion with a 16-2 record. The Golden Eagles’ RPI is 25. Marquette coach Ryan Theiss, then pretty much fresh out of college, was an assistant at EIU the last time it played in the NCAA tourney.
Eastern Illinois moved up to 65 in the latest RPI released this week, but that victory over the tradition-rich Tigers in mid-September should stamp the Panthers as live “undercats” on a neutral floor. The combined scores in that match were 75-56 and Mizzou was held to .110 hitting. Missouri rebounded with a four-set victory in the second of the back-to-backs in Charleston, but the total margin was only 10 points (95-85).
EIU was 10-1 after the weekend set with Missouri concluded its non-conference slate. Also bolstering the Panthers’ mojo had been a four-set triumph over Illinois of the Big Ten in a mid-August exhibition match at Huff Hall in Champaign.
Thomas’ upset-minded crew isn’t typical “low-major” small and is blessed with a star gunner with dynamic athleticism and a wicked topspin jump serve in outside hitter Giovana Larregui Lopez, the two-time OVC player of the year.
“From Day 1 of preseason, we talked about focusing on the preparation: The preparation toward coming to practice, toward your recovery, your healthy lifestyle, nutrition, this drill, this play, really put the focus on this moment,” Thomas said.
“Staying in the now, not focusing on who’s on the other side, but just controlling our controllables. That has helped tremendously in keeping the focus on us. It helped us beat Mizzou and win OVC. When we upset Missouri, it hit home: ‘We can do this.’ And going into Huff and winning the exhibition boosted our confidence that maybe we could do something more special than anyone thought.
Program-building starts
As strange as it might seem, the bleak situation at Eastern Illinois did not appear to be a total black hole to Thomas, who had resurrected the high-school program at her alma mater, Althoff Catholic, in Belleville, Illinois, across the Mississippi River from St. Louis. In her final season there, Althoff went 41-1 and won the 2017 Illinois 3A championship, the state’s second-highest class.
That segued into a two-year stint as an assistant at Missouri State, where she had played collegiately from 2004-07, helping the Bears to three NCAA berths and being named Valley defensive player of the year as a senior.
“When I saw that this EIU job opened up, I was like, they’re really close to home and it’s in my home state,” Thomas recalled. “It’s surrounded by great volleyball, from Chicago, to Louisville, Indiana, Missouri. I thought, man, we could get some really good local kids. So that’s what sparked my interest right away, the location and how good the surrounding talent for recruiting was.”
Then reality hit. Eastern Illinois football might have produced guys such as Tony Romo, Jimmy Garoppolo and Sean Payton, but volleyball was a far different story.
“I got the job and I realized, OK, there was a lot to do,” Thomas said. “I hired Manolo Concepcion (as an assistant), who had been with me for three years, until this past year. Manolo helped get us to where we are. His talent for training was excellent and he had vast international connections.
“We were able to bring in some really high-level international girls, such as our setter, Catalina Rochaix, from Argentina; our libero, Christina Martinez Mundo, and our great outside hitter, Giovana Larregui Lopez, they’re both from Puerto Rico. These were very high-caliber athletes. But in bringing all that together, hard decisions had to be made. When you’re going from a one-win or a three-win program, there have to be those difficult calls.”
The first mission was to establish the elusive “culture” that sabotages many teams.
“We had to really focus on the culture, reframing and reshaping that, just (the players) understanding what hard work is and what ‘grind’ means year-round,” Thomas said. “The first year we got through COVID, the next year we won 11 games, the next season 16 and now we’re here. I never could have done this without my previous staff and the support of the administration.”
For the record, EIU went 2-14 (playing all OVC matches) during the spring COVID season of 2021, took baby steps to 11-18 (4-14 OVC) during the fall of 2021 and climbed to 16-16 (10-8 OVC) in 2022.
Concepcion, who had held the top jobs at Evansville and Western Carolina, moved on to join the coaching staff at Washington as an assistant before the 2023 season. But his fingerprints remain on Eastern Illinois’ program, and Thomas said she valued his mentorship.
Spreading the wealth
The Panthers placed four players on the first team of the All-OVC squad: 5-foot-9 senior Larregui Lopez, sophomore Rochaiz, senior Martinez Mundo and graduate-student opposite Natalie Mitchem. Martinez Mundo was named the most valuable player of the OVC Championship, held on EIU’s home court, after the Panthers swept Arkansas-Little Rock, Southern Indiana and Southeast Missouri State.
A transfer from NAIA College of Coastal Georgia after her sophomore year, Larreagui Lopez cracked 458 kills in 2023 and raised her hitting percentage from .193 as a junior to .304. Her sizzling top-spin jump serve produced 67 aces against only 86 errors, a more-than-acceptable ratio of 1 to 1.28.
The temptation would be to say that Thomas simply shotgunned her roster with international talent, but a closer look shows that the Panthers received significant contributions from “locals” that include Mitchem from Bolingbrook, a western suburb of Chicago; Kaitlyn Flynn, a 6-foot-2 junior OH from Rockford in northern Illinois; Kate Dean, a 6-3 sophomore middle from tiny Tuscola (population 4,626) in east-central Illinois; and Emily Wilcox, a 6-foot senior middle from Fort Wayne in northeast Indiana.
The addition of the 6-2 Mitchem, out of the transfer portal from Ball State of the Mid-American Conference (a mid-major league, but a rung up the ladder from the Ohio Valley) provided the piece of the puzzle that propelled EIU from a .500 team to 28 victories.
Mitchem had been a highly decorated player (first team all-MAC as a junior, second team as a senior) for a Cardinals program that earned NCAA bids in 2019, 2021 and 2022. Racking up 400 kills and an eye-catching .350 hitting percentage, Mitchem made Flynn (who had been first-team All-OVC as a sophomore) the Panthers’ third option, creating vast problems for opposing defenses.
Flynn recorded 15 double-digit kill totals in 30 matches. Dean became a bigger factor in the middle, bettering her hitting percentage from .175 to .341 and her blocks total from 49 to 61. In the OVC title match against SEMO, she ripped eight kills on 11 errorless attacks and chipped in four blocks.
The late-season X-factor for Thomas has been Wilcox, the epitome of a “program” kid who played her way into the lineup, replacing Julia Stanev, a 6-foot-3 freshman from Italy.
“Emily demonstrates how true patience pays off,” Thomas said. “Our non-starters do extra lifting during the season and our strength coach named them the ‘Diesel Group.’ Here was Emily grinding every day in practice, going against our starters, getting stronger to where her time just came a little bit later in the season. Julia started off really strong, and I’m a coach who’s going to play the player who is the best at that time.
“Emily is peaking just at the right moment. Julia’s great – she’s 6-3, physical, a blocking machine – but Emily has just brought a little more offensive dynamic.”
As might be expected, the team’s success has translated to more support from the student body and the Charleston community. The OVC final drew 1,612 to on-campus Groninger Arena on a Wednesday night.
“Our community showed up for the OVC championship,” Thomas said. “It was awesome. I’m hoping that some of them come to our NCAA match, which is only two hours away.”
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