Tomorrow night, April 4, I will sit in Hilliard
Gates Sports Center
for about the 200th time in my life and I will watch Arnie Ball
coach for the final time. Ever.
It is, deep down, mind boggling on about every level. Ball
is, more than anyone ever has been to me, the single biggest representation of
IPFW. Not volleyball, not coaching, not athletics; Arnie Ball is IPFW.
I was an eighteen-year-old freshman the first time that I
ever saw a men’s volleyball contest. It seemed like an odd idea to me when I
stepped foot into the Gates Center
to cover a match. I don’t remember who they were playing or even if they won
that day in early 2003, but I was enthralled. The way that Jeff Ptak and Matt
Zbyszewski hit the ball with such velocity was a thing of beauty. I was sold on
having the men’s volleyball beat.
Then I wrote a column for the IPFW student newspaper, The
Communicator, that didn’t exactly make Coach Ball happy. So I covered men’s
volleyball for a full season basically without any quotes from him, instead
drawing on the likes of Zbyszewski, Serdar Sikca and Mike Daiga for my stories.
But this isn’t about my relationship with Coach Ball, which was healed pretty
quickly. Instead, it is about the legacy that he leaves behind.
Ball, simply put, has left a mark on every person he comes
into any significant contact with. He taught me a lot of things as a young
student writer that I wasn’t getting anywhere else. He wasn’t a journalism guy
and couldn’t teach me how to write a lede or about AP style. But he also was the
easiest and toughest interview I have ever had and because of that, perhaps my
all-time favorite.
If one of my questions was too vague or too dumb, Arnie
would answer. And his answer would be vague or unusable. See, for Arnie, if I
couldn’t ask him good enough questions, why should he spoon feed me an answer?
I don’t know if that was ever his intention or not, but it is how it worked on
me. In his own way, sitting on the other end of the phone or of his office,
Arnie coached me to become a better interviewer and challenged me to do a
better job covering his team and his program.
It propelled me into some of my best stories I ever wrote
for The Communicator during the 2006 season, watching the Mastodons break
records, including for most consecutive wins and a trip to the Final Four in State
College, Pennsylvania. The trip
to State College to watch IPFW unsuccessfully challenge
UCLA will always be one of my favorites when it comes to covering a sport. I
watched the team grow and I grew as a reporter because of Ball’s willingness to
keep me in the loop and interest in sitting down with me or being just a phone
call away whenever I needed some last second thought.
What also made my time covering men’s volleyball at IPFW
easier were the players. From all of the guys previously mentioned to CJ
Macias, Brock Ullrich and Elon Fyfield, the players in the system have been
nothing short of amazing to interview or simply to talk to. And that isn’t
thanks to his coaching as much as it is to his recruiting. The reason that IPFW
has been so successful on the volleyball court is because Ball, at least in my
time watching the team, has recruited good kids who work hard to be the best
but also don’t take life, or the sport, too seriously.
By the time I covered my last IPFW volleyball game in the spring
of 2009, sitting down with Arnie in his office weekly on a Monday afternoon for
30-45 minutes became the regular. We would interview and we would just talk. In
that time, much more mature than I was when I first met him at eighteen, Coach
Ball became a good acquaintance. Back at The Communicator after a couple of years
away from school, I really looked forward to nothing more than he and I’s
conversations.
Tomorrow night will be surreal knowing it is the last time
that I will see him coaching in that gym, on a court that will now be named for
him.
In the world of men’s volleyball nationwide, Arnie Ball is a
legend, widely respected by his peers. In my 15 and change years of journalism,
there has been no story or interview subject that has left as big of an overall
impression on me as Coach Ball. His candidness, his swagger, his ability to get
the absolute best out of everyone he comes in contact with — they are all
legendary.
And after tomorrow night, Arnie
Ball Court, surely will never be the same again.
