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- Shirley Ryan was such a great coach and mentor.
- Will not find a more devoted and committed coach.
- She was a good coach.
I'm glad she was my coach.
- We got to be great friends.
We're still good friends now and stuff.
We've coached her grandchildren together
and actually, we retired in 2010 from coaching
and now I'm coaching my granddaughter.
- She was always there as a really good coach
and then as someone to talk to, as well.
- Off the court, she is one of the kindest,
most generous, most giving, most funny,
loving person that you can imagine.
And on the court, while she's competing,
she is the most tenacious, fierce,
just intense, amazing, focused woman.
But she was fierce.
She was fierce.
- We didn't have a sports program to build on
and so Shirley kind of started the whole program
and so we were learning how to play.
We played a lot of the same teams several times.
- I served on a committee to study what sports
would be the reasonable sports
for girls in Mount Vernon to have
and on the basis of that, it was decided
that girls wanted to try a flag football.
They wanted to play volleyball, basketball, softball.
They wanted to run track.
So the school decided to let whatever girls
wanted to try out for whatever sport
and they went about two weeks to a month
in a lot of different sports
and then the girls got to experience them.
In that fall, then, when it was time to do volleyball,
I went with Halsey down to Lickett Stanwood,
which is North Cedar now, and we played
in a couple of games there.
As I look back at those 35 some years,
of course your teams that won the state championship,
that is absolutely unforgettable experience.
- We were state champions in 1984.
- My senior year, we won state.
- We also had some unforgettable losses.
Not only the three at the state championship level
where we were second.
- My junior year, we were ranked 13th
and we on to finish second at state and then my senior year,
we also finished second at state.
- There are so many years that the girls all bonded together
so well and they liked each other
and they did all of the things that you're supposed to do
to be a great teammate and trying to play for each other.
- We had a lot of team meetings and team bonding time
where we'd watch movies, eat too much food,
and not really focused on volleyball,
just focused on growing relationships with each other.
And so because of our close knit relationships,
it allowed us to be successful on the court.
- What I remember is the feelings.
The laughing on the bus.
I remember just the interaction,
the connection, this family.
- One of my best memories, I would say,
didn't even happen on the court.
Before every game, we would dance with each other,
listen to certain songs.
We listened to Mulan, "Make a Man Out of You",
and we had a certain dance to that
and we did it every single time
and we had so much fun before we even went out on the court.
We had a really good culture on the team.
Everyone got along.
- Some years, our opponent just had a real
unbelievably skillful player that could dominate the court
and take that match away from us.
- We would get all the way through the conference,
we would get through regionals or districts or whatever,
however it goes, and then we would get to Clinton Mater Dei
and we always had to beat Clinton Mater Dei to go to state
and my freshman, sophomore, and junior years,
they had a set of twins and another sister.
They're called the Dye sisters, D-Y-E,
and they were awesome.
And so freshman, sophomore, junior year,
we all got beaten by them.
- Clinton Mater Dei was who we had to face
in the regional final three years in a row
and that was the three consecutive years
they won the state championship.
So we only got beat those years
by the eventual state champion.
- I had one game away from state, one game away from state,
and Shirley, of course, was always devastated.
But we would always come back the next years.
- And so finally, the twins graduated
and it was just Mary Dye and we finally beat them
to go to the state as a senior.
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- Some years, we didn't play
as well together as we could've.
We maybe bailed a little bit in that final game
or choked a little bit,
but we always throughout all of those losses,
that's been the coolest thing that still happens
to this day in Mount Vernon volleyball
is we've had tremendous student body support
and tremendous fan support in this community.
All and all, the teams that performed the best
and that won and were able to do that
was usually when there were one or two players on that team
that were not gonna let that win slip away.
No matter what the cost was, they were gonna work that hard.
- I think Coach Shirley Ryan was so successful
because she was a lifelong learner.
She always was going to extra drills, extra camps, clinics,
and she was always on the cutting edge of what is current
in volleyball skills and volleyball development.
- She would go to every clinic.
She would read every book.
She would watch everything she could get her hands on
and she would study the game
and study the game and study the game.
- And she's such a fountain of knowledge.
She was a student of the game.
She was so successful because she never learned something
and then always did that same thing
because there's always new developments.
- She was always looking for new drills,
new tests for us.
- Many of us that were early head coaches in the 70s
all went to Lamoni and then we started going
to other universities and their camps
and working one-on-one with university coaches
to learn the sport because we didn't get to be players
because we were before title nine.
- She didn't have sports in high school
where she was, either, so she had never played volleyball.
So she just learned volleyball through studying it.
- I always wanted the very best athlete
to be the hardest working girl on the team.
I think probably worked and learned over the course
of time a lot more techniques and a lot more strategies
for coaching psychology on how to get
the most out of players.
And so I think I improved, too.
We would try to make sure
that we were playing sport for fun.
We wanted it to be something special
that kids would enjoy and they would remember
the comradery of the sport.
We did care what the win-loss record was,
but that was secondary to having fun.
Having fun at the sport is still what it's all about.
It is why kids play sport.
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