Volleyball Coach Jim Dietz talks to players during the Sept. 10 match against Lincoln College.
By Ryan Wilson, Editor
SPRINGFIELD — It was Aug. 27, 1996, at Oblong, Ill., about 40 miles east of Effingham, and Lincoln Land Community College’s volleyball coach, Jim Dietz, was “scared snot-less.”
This was a match between the St. Anthony High School Bulldogs and the Oblong High School Panthers. St. Anthony High School is a 156-year-old Catholic school in Effingham, Ill.
This was Dietz’s first head-coaching job, and on this day in 1996, it was his first match.
“It (winning 500-plus matches) makes me feel old,” said Dietz, 46, who has been a head coach for 18 years, the last nine at Lincoln Land. “I still remember a lot of wins (and) a lot of losses, also. It didn’t feel different than the others.”
Dietz won his 500th game on Oct. 18, when Lincoln Land beat Lewis and Clark Community College, 3-0, in the Loggers’ second match of the MWAC Tournament.
“What it did was give me an excuse to think about the players I’ve had an opportunity to coach,” he said.
Lincoln Land’s volleyball team finished 25-18 this season. It lost to Parkland College, then the top-ranked team in the nation, 1-3, in the second round of the Region 24 Tournament.
“It’s hard to sum it (this season) all up with a glib word or phrase, especially when you don’t quite reach your goal,” said Dietz, who has 294 wins at Lincoln Land.
Finding inspiration
Dietz says he tries to emulate some of his coaching philosophies after his former colleague: Jim Stone.
Stone previously coached the Ohio State’s women’s volleyball team for 26 years. He is currently the assistant coach for Michigan State University’s women’s volleyball team.
Dietz was an assistant coach on Stone’s Ohio State team from 1992 to 1994. The Buckeyes were Big 10 champions and Final Four competitors in Dietz’s last year at the school. Dietz said he liked Stone’s techniques for teaching passing and defense.
“I liked how he (Jim Stone) coached, so I’ve modeled a lot of things (after him), after he built the Ohio State program: professionalism, not yelling at players,” he said. “Those three years were instrumental in my coaching philosophy.”
Devising plans Laura Payne, who played on Lincoln Land’s volleyball team in 2009 and 2010, said she enjoyed playing under Dietz.
“He knew that mistakes would happen, but was always more focused on how to fix those mistakes … other than screaming and yelling,” she said. “He was known for coming up with some off-the-wall plans that always some how worked.”
Payne said Dietz commonly calls two consecutive time outs in a match.
“The other team has normally already made it back out on the court and is completely confused, when he does it (call two straight time outs),” she said. “The normal response from the other coach is, ‘Can he do that?’ In turn, our team would start laughing, relax and go back out (on the court) and play well.
“Dietz knows when they (his players) got too stressed and tense.”
Knowing the game
Dietz, a former freshman composition teacher at Iowa State University, is also known for paying close attention to players’ stats in a game.
“Now that I have coached with him for a few years, I have seen how he goes about coaching: stats, stats and more stats!” says Payne, who is in her second year as an assistant coach of the Loggers’ volleyball team.
“You wouldn’t believe the numbers this guy can crunch and remember. So many times everyone notices the hitter that hits the ball the hardest, or passer that has the coolest dive across the floor. But I think he (Dietz) wins because he follows the numbers.”
Stone gave Dietz a copy of “Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game” by Michael Lewis. The book is about the Oakland Athletics’ general manager Billy Beane, and his success from studying baseball stats.
“His (Stone’s) ability as a coach is under-rated. I think he’s the best technical instructor for passing in the U.S. today,” Dietz said, adding that Russ Rose, the current women’s volleyball coach at Penn State University, would agree.
Rose has coached at Penn State for 36 years. His team faced Dietz’s teams at Ohio State, Iowa State University and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Two years before Dietz was an assistant coach at Ohio State, he worked with the University of Illinois’ women’s volleyball in 1990.
He worked with Iowa State’s team a year later.
Surprisingly, Dietz was new to the game, when he started at the U of I.
Learning the sport, Dietz went to his first volleyball game in 1989 when Iowa was at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
“It (attending the game) was a cheap date, and I hate the Hawkeyes,” said Dietz, who has a master’s degree in history from the U of I and another degree in English/composition from Iowa State.
But even with little prior knowledge of the sport, Dietz said he enjoyed the crowd, pep band and 50-cent tickets.
“Then (I) kept going to matches, and I learned the rules through osmosis — trial and error.”
The next year, he worked with the team. He left that job after one year to teach at Iowa State and work with the school’s volleyball team.
He left ISU after one year to coach under Stone for the next three years. Dietz then left that job in 1994 to take his first head-coaching job at St. Anthony where he coached from 1996 to 2003.
In 2004, he went to Allen Community College to coach its volleyball team. Dietz, who wrote a book called “The Human Side of Coaching,” which talks about coaches’ relationships with players and parents, was hired 10 days into the preseason after the school’s previous volleyball coach “got mad” at the athletic director and left the team. Dietz said the coach then erased all the team’s recruiting info on the school’s computers.
“After leaving the kids in a lurch, we got them back on track by the end of September. (The players were) buying into what we were doing,” Dietz said.
However, the Allen Community College’s previous coach was not finished with the team.
“He came to a match, watched them (the players) play and started contacting them, telling them what he would’ve done. (Then) boom — a long losing streak.”
Dietz heard about an opening to coach at Lincoln Land in 2005.
He said he knew of the job before LLCC’s athletic director, Ron Riggle.
“The AD was stunned I knew the coach was resigning before he did — since they were married this is a reasonable reaction — and was impressed,” Dietz said.
Riggle is married to Angie Riggle, who coached Lincoln Land’s volleyball team before Dietz.
Dietz said he later got the job at LLCC in which he made about $5,000 in his first season in 2006.
“Coach Dietz does an exceptional job with the volleyball team,” Ron Riggle said. “He has turned our volleyball program into a national ranked and well known program. Jim is an asset to the athletic department.”
Rewriting history
Dietz’s first match as a Logger was a 2-0 win over St. Louis Community College-Florissant Valley. The Loggers went 30-20 that season.
Dietz has helped Lincoln Land’s volleyball team have eight consecutive seasons with more than 30 wins and getting ranked as one of the top-20 teams in the nation for his first eight seasons.
“I could swear it was just yesterday that I was scared snot-less in my first year, as a high school coach,” Dietz said. “Then I blinked, and here I am with 500 wins and next year set to pick up number 300 at LLCC.”
Ryan Wilson can be reached at [email protected] or 217-786-2311.
Note: This article was published in the Nov. 19, 2014, edition of The Lamp.
