Arnie Ball leaves legendary mark

I don’t really take the time to write much anymore just to write. But this strikes me as one of those things that I really need to put fingers to keyboard about.

Tomorrow night, April 4, I will sit in Hilliard Gates Sports Center for about the 200^th 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.

The rise of IPFW: Part 4

Dane Fife was just 25 years old when he was named the head coach at IPFW.

It was a huge story on campus, a big one in the city of Fort Wayne and even had national appeal due to his high profile playing career and his new claim to being the youngest men’s head coach in Division I. No matter how I felt then, how I feel now; I will always love the fact that we, the IPFW Communicator, broke the story.

Throughout the search, myself, Justin Kenny, Nick West and Tony Maurer were all over it. We asked anyone we could, any time we could. Talked to players to find out who interviewed, called candidates, and followed every last lead. The night before the announcement, we got confirmation: Dane Fife was to be the head coach. At the time, IPFW’s web presence was slight, but we had to break the story. We had to beat Sarah Trotto at the Journal Gazette, we had to beat everyone. Just after midnight, my story, with credit to my Communicator colleagues, went live on CollegeHoops.Net. Now, the site sits as an unupdated shell, but then it was one of the biggest hit-garnering websites for college basketball anywhere. And we broke the story. And I will always love that.

The press conference went off without a hitch and Dane Fife said all of the right things, all out of the script he seemed to have written for himself in his mind. Once and now again colleague Justin Kenny and I wrote contrasting columns in the first issue of the IPFW student paper, The Communicator, just days after the hiring. I think Justin was trying to play devil’s advocate in his. In my column, I was honest. The hiring was insane to me.

Looking back to almost nine years ago when the hire was made, I have now spent a lot of time around Dane Fife. Although it has been years, he was once one of the few people that I saw pretty much every single day. I have a greater respect for Dane as a person and as a coach than I could have imagined.

But in May 2005, I was appalled and pretty well thought that IPFW AD Mark Pope was out of his mind. Why? To sell tickets? So the Memorial Coliseum would echo just a little less? To motivate the players by giving them someone who could relate to them? Didn’t you just have the guy to relate to them? I kept my column tame; I kept a lot of questions hid internally.

Mark Pope opened the press conference with a phrase. I opened my news story for the front page of The Communicator quoting the same phrase: “Dane Fife is the right man at the right time for IPFW.”

I didn’t believe a word of it.

And before we could even see who was right and who was wrong, that darkness that began a year or so earlier engulfed the program. In one full swoop, walk-on Andrew Bourne and returning leading scorers Pete Campbell and Beau Bauer were gone, decisions made what we thought to be independently at the time. The next fall, in an interview I did with Campbell about the mass exodus over two years of athletes from the school, he was pretty clear that he left in part because the writing was on the wall. What writing? Within months of Fife’s hire, he cleaned house. While the squad lost Simon to graduation and the three others before school was out, Fife’s summer cleaning list was long: Byron Malone, Jason Malone, Charles Campbell, Quintin Butler. And all of the sudden, there stood the transfers, Scott and Pompey, with returners Justin Hawkins, Quintin Carouthers and Zeljko Egeric and it looked like an atomic bomb had been dropped on the program.

When 'Soup' left,
things looked fishy.

If I questioned the hiring before, I was mortified now. So, we don’t need any starters back? Seven players are just gone? The entire backcourt?

And then Dane grew on me. His personality, his friendship, his work ethic. He didn’t always do things the way that was expected. He, like Doug Noll, drew criticism. But he pressed on. Dane Fife did things Dane Fife’s way for his entire tenure. And it wasn’t just the right way, it was the only way. He let Scott shine, becoming then one of IPFW’s all-time great scorers. He brought it strong recruits like NJCAA All-American Jaraun Burrows and Kansas State transfer Deilvez Yearby. He recruited locally hard and while not landing a big local talent for years, he was persistent.

Furthermore, IPFW had never had a winning record in its D1 tenure, but Fife took them to 10 wins in his first season. The next it was 12 wins and the following season he was where some thought we needed Dement to get us: a conference.

Dane Fife’s win total always grew. 13 wins in the first season in the new Summit League (formerly the Mid-Continent Conference), 13 more in the second year, then 16. Then in 2010-2011, Dane Fife took the Mastodons of IPFW to 18-12, 11-7 in the conference. It was the first winning record in the program since Andy Piazza took them to their best record ever, 23-6 in the 1992-1993 season. Dane Fife was 13.

When looking at the grand landscape of the program, Dane Fife was the lynchpin. Not only was Dane the “right man at the right time for IPFW,” I now believe he was the only man for the job. That’s not to say that lighting a candle wouldn’t have ended the dark years, but Dane had the testicular fortitude to drop a bomb on the dark years and say, “it’s over, let’s move on.”

Losing Dane Fife to Michigan State in 2011 looked like it was going to be the biggest loss in the history of IPFW athletics.