Women's Volleyball 6/21/2007 5:06:00 PM

A Conversation With ... MARY TENDLER

Throughout the summer, ElonPhoenix.com will sit down with some of our program’s head coaches to spend time getting to know them a little better. This session will feature head volleyball coach Mary Tendler, who will enter her fifth season at the helm of the Phoenix this fall. Tendler played her collegiate volleyball as Mary Eggers at Illinois. She led the Fighting Illini to two national semi-final appearances while earning First Team All-American honors three times and being named the Honda National Player of the Year after her senior campaign. She went on to spend time with the US National Team as well as playing three years professionally overseas.

EP: When did you start playing volleyball? How did you get into it?
MT: Well, I started playing in eighth grade because my pastor at church was really into volleyball. So I started on a church league with my parents and my pastor and his kids and really enjoyed that so I tried out for the junior high team.

EP: How did you know that you wanted to be good and that you really loved volleyball?
MT: I really didn’t know for a while. I started playing club volleyball when I was a sophomore for Sports Performance in Chicago and I didn’t realize how many people played volleyball and I got an education there and saw how big of a sport it was and just wanted to see how good I could get.

EP: Talk a little bit about how you decided to go to Illinois and why. How did that decision come about?
MT: I wanted to stay close to home because I come from a pretty big family and wanted them to be able to watch me play. There were some schools in the area that were a top-20 program, but I didn’t want to go there, I wanted to go to a school where I could help build a program. Illinois was 15-18 the year before I got there and two years before that they were 5-25. So it was kind of fun helping them develop into a Final Four team. A lot like it is here at Elon, when I started coaching here, what attracted me to Elon was it was the kind of program we could build into a very successful one.

EP: What were some of the other schools you considered?
MT: I chose between Northwestern, Illinois State, which was a top-20 program at the time, Western Michigan and Illinois.

EP: You already touched on helping to build a program. As you mentioned, the Illini were 5-25 two years before you arrived. Your freshman season your team won 30 straight matches and you were named Big Ten Freshman of the Year. Talk about that experience.
MT: Well I had never seen a college volleyball match before I played, so I had no idea. I’m very much into statistics, so I learned what a hitting efficiency was and I looked at the past players and they were all hitting under .200. So, I was figuring out, you get 10 swings, three kills and one error – that seemed pretty easy in my head. When I played, I didn’t know who I was playing. We would go up against Purdue or Northwestern, who were the top teams at the time, and I wasn’t intimidated because I didn’t know who any of the people were. I was just very naïve going into it, so it was just fun.

EP: You talked a little bit about the stats and the hitting percentage. In 1986 and 1988, you led the country in hitting percentage and one of those still stand as a top-five percentage in the NCAA and your career hitting percentage of .420, which stood as an NCAA record for about five seasons, is still third. Just talk about that and the importance of hitting percentage and what it means as a player and in the game.
MT: First of all, I didn’t know it was top-three all time! I played as a middle blocker and it’s a little easier to get a higher percentage playing in the middle than it is for an outside hitter. The setter has a lot of choices when they go to set the ball and if you want to get more sets you become more efficient and the setter will go to you more often. I was really fortunate that I played on a team that had really good passing and for a middle to be able to hit you need to have really good passers. So the setter was able to get me the ball a lot and I was able to find some holes in the defense. I wasn’t necessarily a power hitter, I was a smart hitter and I had really good vision to see the court and where the openings were.

EP: You followed up your Big Ten Freshman of the Year with three Big Ten Player of the Year honors, three First Team All-American accolades and the Honda National Player of the Year award following your senior season. What did those awards mean to you? Were those goals you set for yourself?
MT: No. I mean, once our team got into the top-20, I wanted to play on a team that won the National Championship – that was the ultimate goal. We came short of that; we got two third-place finishes, losing to Hawaii both years. So it was a little disappointing. The teams that do well, they look for a player on those teams to give the All-American awards to and the MVP. So without being on a successful team and having good coaches I would never have gotten those awards. It was kind of neat that I played on such a close knit team that I would win an award and sometime I think my teammates were more excited than I was. It was cool to be in that sort of atmosphere.

EP: You talked a little bit about playing in the national tournament – you won three Big Ten championships and made two trips to the national semifinals as well as having two unbeaten season in the Big Ten. You said that when you first got there you didn’t know who you were playing against. Obviously as you got more into it you learned that competition. What was it like to play at that level and have that sort of excitement around playing volleyball?
MT: I enjoyed it because when I first went to Illinois we had about 80 fans in the gym and before I even became a sophomore we were selling out Kinny Gym. It had a balcony over top and people were just crashing in there. Eventually the fire department had to come because we were breaking fire codes. People were trying to come in through windows. It just became the thing to do in Champaign, go to volleyball matches. It is a lot more fun to play when you have a crowd watching you. I would go to the gym and there would already be a couple hundred people there before I would even go to the locker room to put my uniform on. And after we would win, the band would be playing and everybody sings the alma mater and we stay on the court and there are all these little kids and you are giving autographs. And for someone who is 20 years old, to go through all that, you don’t realize it at the time but that was just an amazing thing to go through. And to this day, because of the good experiences we’ve had, I’ve kept pretty close with my teammates and coaches.

EP: Illinois has been a powerful volleyball school. You still hold records there in hitting percentage, aces, blocks and kills as well as being named the Athlete of the Year in1987, ‘88 and ‘89 and the Female Athlete of the Decade for the ‘80s. What does it mean that you still stand as one of the best volleyball players to play at such a great school?
MT: Well I’m hoping there are better volleyball players and that the teams there do better and win a National Championship – something we couldn’t get done. The athletes that they get today are much better than the athletes we were back in the late ‘80s. They are taller, they jump higher – so it is a lot different than when I played. It is neat to see your name still in there. My parents still go to the matches there and they always get people to say hi to them and remember who they are.

EP: After you were done you spent a year and a half with the US National Team. Talk a little about the tryout for that team and just the experience of playing on the team.
MT: I drove out to San Diego for a three-month tryout. I left right after the fall season, so I didn’t have my undergraduate degree. I was just going blindly out there. There were just two mid-western players out there, everyone else was from California, so it was a big adjustment for me. I enjoyed being a full-time volleyball player for the first time in my life – practicing twice a day, lifting every day and just the competition in practice was amazing. The best thing about it was that it gave me the opportunity to travel internationally and to places I would never go to. I went to Cuba a couple times and got to go to China and Hungary and Spain and Switzerland and Japan. We didn’t get to do a lot of site seeing, but we still got to interact with the other teams who had totally different experience than we had. I would definitely do it again if given the opportunity and I still like to go oversees.

EP: After that you played professionally in both Germany and France. What was that like to be in a different culture and playing on those teams?
MT: I was fortunate that the teams really accepted me as a part of their team and there were two foreign players on each team. It was difficult because I really enjoy the coaching part of it and that is why I’m a coach because I love the strategies and I love the things a coach says and how they try to change things. I’m very curious about all that stuff. And when you don’t speak the language – the coach is speaking German and you are in the timeout and don’t understand a thing they are saying – it becomes a little difficult. So I didn’t get a lot of instruction. I was just expected to go out and play and do well. It was different. On the court, there is a language you have to know to be able to play and I had to learn that language in German or French and that is hard to change.

EP: Were there any players on your team that could speak to you in English?
MT: Each year there were a couple people that could speak English pretty well. So I assume they would tell me if I needed to know anything … The only thing I can remember the coach telling me in Germany was, “Mary! Block ball!”

EP: How did you decide you wanting to go into coaching?
MT: Early on, I never knew I wanted to be a coach. I was a business administration major. But I had such good experiences – in college, with the national team – and such good coaches that I wanted to try to give back and hopefully give my players some of those same experiences.

EP: You played for Mike Hebert at Illinois who is now coaching at Minnesota and has also guided them to a Final Four appearance and has collected over 850 career wins. Do you feel like you really learned a lot from playing for him?
MT: Definitely. Of all the teams I played on, both volleyball and some basketball, he’s my favorite coach. I liked him because he was a very clam coach, a very analytical coach and listened to what you said. We had a good relationship. There are a few of us that are in coaching and junior nationals are in Minneapolis this year where he lives so we are trying to get together at his house.

EP: So you have teammates that are in coaching also?
MT: Desa (Johnson) Garner is at James Madison. Laura (Bush) Farina is at Auburn. And there are a few that coach club and high school.

EP: What do you think are some of the most important things that you try to teach your players and convey to them and get them to understand?
MT: I think, the important thing is that you enjoy what you are doing on the volleyball court. And to realize that volleyball is a game. And that you can have fun and work hard at the same time. And if you are doing that, you are going to win matches. I think the players here realize that and they do work hard and I think it is going to translate into a lot of success at Elon.

EP: Talk a little bit about this year’s team as far as what you having coming back and what you have coming in and how that will work itself out in your team’s identity this season.
MT: I’m really excited about this fall because we have five additional players than we had last fall. I think we’ll have the best ball control team that we’ve ever had here at Elon as far as serve receive passing and defense and I think when you have a team that is very active defensively they are very fun to watch and it motivates them in other areas. I think the people that come out and watch our matches are really going to enjoy this group of girls.

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