I had wondered what would happen in the offseason regarding the UT Arlington volleyball team in more than one regard. The loss of five graduate seniors, four of whom were regular starters, casts a lot of question marks coming into next season. Now another question is added.
Announced on Friday, J.T. Wenger, the head coach for the past eight years, will become the next head coach for the Gonzaga Bulldogs of the West Coast Conference. He leaves the Mavs after a career 140-92 record, good for a .603 winning percentage.
I wondered if he would catapult the 29-3 2024 season with the regular season and Western Athletic Conference tournament championship that resulted in an NCAA tournament appearance into a higher profile, higher resourced or more nationally-known job. I wasn't sure either way if he would for one main reason.
His first seven seasons resulted in a winning percentage of approximately 55 percent. The best finish in conference play was fourth in several seasons: 2020, 2021 and 2023. Now the Sun Belt Conference did division play during Coach Wenger's time at UTA in the SBC. He was third in the West Division three times and was second in 2021, his best overall finish prior to this year.
He never appeared in a conference tournament final until this year. His team only appeared in the conference semifinals twice prior in the Wenger era. His conference tournament record prior to 2024 was 5-7. Only one of the seven losses came in five sets.
He did lead a team to the National Invitational Volleyball Tournament twice, garnering a 3-2 record. Each loss was to a team that would win at least one more after defeating UTA.
Had Mollie Blank. Brianna Ford, Paige Reagor all graduate students who earned postseason honors, not returned this year, what kind of season would UT Arlington fans be looking at? They certainly would not be 29-3. Top half in the WAC likely. But that's all that seems certain.
All that to say, I wasn't certain about Coach Wenger's future either way. This was a great year, no question. But it certainly was an outlier compared to the other seven years. All else being equal, Athletic Departments tend to look at a fuller body of work. There's not a lot of schools ahead of UTA in the resource, facility, tradition, following, etc as compared to those under UTA. Those ahead tend to be a bit more picky.
Coach Wenger is from the West Coast, having played at the University of California Los Angeles, and been an assistant for the same UCLA program. He then went to the women's game for Colorado, then a lone seasons at Michigan State. While he grew up in Illinois, the bulk of his adult life has been spent in the Pacific time zone. UTA was his first head job and I have no doubt he's excited to go to the West Coast again.
The reality for UTA is if they want to elevate the athletic department to the heights they have set for themselves, this kind of thing has to happen in the short term. There used to be a small, but steady pace of Maverick coaches being poached. It slowed quite a bit, but now maybe has resumed.
Texas-Austin swiped Hall of Fame women's basketball coach Jody Conradt, who is the matriarch of the entire women's sports program at UTA. After her final year at UTA in 1976, Coach Conradt would win numerous conference championships and one National title.
Lisa Love went to the University of Southern California to start the 1989 season after dominating at UTA in Volleyball, making the Regional Final in her final year. It culminated a 4-4 record in the NCAA Tournament in her last four years.
After the 1995 outdoor season, the track and field head coach left for Texas Christian University. Monte Stratton was a twelve-time coach of the year across the two genders in cross country, indoor and outdoor programs. Prior to 1989, there were no team championships or coach of the year honors in 64 tries.
Breaking a long streak in 2020, women's coach Krista Gerlich left UTA after winning 121 games out of 215 tries. She rebuilt a four-win team the previous year to one that was challenging the top of the Sun Belt. She's had two winning seasons in a row, the first time that has happened since 2013.
Numerous other coaches went on after UTA to become assistants at other Universities, head coaches at lower division schools, or in one case, the pros: John Symank in football, Eddie McCarter, Scott Cross (huge asterisk here) and Chris Ogden in men's basketball and Jerry Isler in women's basketball are the ones that come to my mind off the top of my head.
Obviously during the holiday season, there is nothing on the coaching search front. There's enough time and it's early in the offseason that the departure doesn't hurt at this point. It's also too early to determine if that means there will be any players leaving. One thing is for sure, the Maverick volleyball squad will have a very different look next year.
For sure, this is the end of an era in intercollegiate athletics. It has always been true that "the rich get richer." The current trend has NIL, unlimited transfers, expanded numbers of scholarships allowed per team (ie: baseball tripled) and the almost promiscuous addition of extra years of eligibility. $uper conferences have pretty much crushed the ambitions of newer or less prominent FBS schools to ever step up and compete on an equal footing with group of four conference FB powers. (And yet, ironically, the new rules have allowed the likes of SMU, Tulane, Colorado and Vanderbilt to go out and purchase some very talented football teams.) The days of UTA having the continuity of a freshman hoops recruit playing his or her entire athletic career at UTA have ended. Under the current situation, we will likely never see another Jorge Bilbao at our school. And even the large P4 conference teams will have massive churn in their player rosters. It is not unusual for a new football coach to bring in 70 or more transfers, and then be compelled to re-recruit the best players again every year. I'm not sure what happens to the players that are not re-recruited. Are they fired? And is it possible for there to be any walk-ons? As much as fans always support winning, I expect the loss of continuity will negatively affect any pretense of the players being "student athletes," and will foster the notion that college sports are merely lower-level professional sports. Perhaps that may be acceptable to most fans, but I expect there will be considerable attempts by the politicians to impose some kind of sanity, and we will see if, as usual, they only make matters worse. Will NIL and 34 full scholarships per college baseball teams effectively kill minor league baseball?
ReplyDelete