By Daniel Kerwin

When head volleyball coach Stephanie Schleuder graduated from the University of Minnesota, Duluth in 1972, there weren’t many opportunities for women to make any money coaching collegiate sports. She didn’t let that stop her, and now she has added to her already impressive college volleyball coaching career with her 700th coaching victory.Schleuder entered the season with 696 coaching wins, and reached the 700 mark with Macalester’s victory over Dubuque on Sept. 18. The win also marked the first victory for the team in the Leonard Center since the facility opened last summer. The Scots are off to a 6-9 start, already an improvement from their 4-24 record all of last year.

“More important than 700 for me was that we win some games for our team,” Schleuder said. “I’m kind of glad it’s over with.”

Schleuder ranks third on the active wins list for Division III women’s volleyball coaches, but that only tells part of the story of her career. She has made great strides to give back to her profession, the pinnacle of this being when she served a four-year term as the President of the American Volleyball Coaches Association starting in 2001. During her term she played an influential role in developing a diversity program to get more women of color into the coaching ranks, in creating a hall of fame, and a high-school All-American program that she had written the guidelines for before being elected President.

“I have always felt like it’s really important to give back to the profession, so I’ve considered that an important part of my professional responsibilities, but I also enjoy it a lot too,” Schleuder said.

She also has published numerous articles about volleyball and coaching volleyball, including a book, “Comprehensive Volleyball Statistics, A Guide for Coaches, Media and Fans,” that was published in 1998, and in 1990 coached Team North to a gold medal victory in the U.S. Olympic Festival, a tournament that used to showcase Olympic level talent but no longer exists, which Scheuder says is a shame.

A lot has happened in women’s collegiate sports between Schleuder’s first career win and now. Schleuder, a native Minnesotan, says that when she was in high school girls didn’t have many opportunities to get involved in sports. The only sports experience she had in high school was a singular basketball game against Edina during her senior year. When she got to UMD she took full advantage of the athletic program, lettering in five different sports.

“I thought I’d died and gone to heaven when I got to UMD and they had lots of opportunities,” Schleuder said.

Schleuder graduated from UMD the same year that Title IX was introduced, which she says had led to the most important changes in increasing the options for women in sports.

Schleuder took up coaching both volleyball and basketball after graduating, starting at Bemidji State University, then moving to UMD and in 1974 moving to the University of Alabama, coaching there at the same time that Bear Bryant was Alabama’s football coach. Three years into her tenure at Alabama she started coaching volleyball exclusively. In 1982 she moved to the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities, and has been at Macalester since 1998, a move that was also a transition for a Division I to a Division III program.

“I’ve really enjoyed the change in coming to Macalester,” Schleuder said. “I thoroughly enjoyed my experiences at Alabama and Minnesota, it was exciting, there’s nothing like playing in front of huge crowds, but this is just a different experience and more like how I think philosophically athletics should blend with the educational experience. I think we have our emphasis in the right places, student athletes have great experiences but there is also never any doubt that academics come first.”

Schleuder says one of the moments she really noticed the difference between Divisions was when she first got to Macalester, when after a game she went out into the hall after a game expecting to find her team sleeping as her Division I players had done after games, but instead she found them all studying.

With her current Macalester team, she hopes that the program can turn itself around after a couple of down years and be successful in a conference that boasts six of the top 30 teams in the nation.

“I feel good about our team this year, I think we’ve added some depth to the team and some strength at specific positions, so I think we’re better this year than we have been the last couple of years,” Schleuder said.

Schleuder is now up to 702 wins; hopefully a new milestone is just over the horizon.