When reliving a memorable sporting event, it's common for fans, media members and even the participants themselves to look for "the turning point," that moment when the game changed for good.
But for one of the most epic and exciting events in the long and storied history of athletics at Loyola University Chicago, the turning point didn't come until the final ball hit the floor.
The Ramblers are celebrating the five-year anniversary of the men's volleyball team winning its second straight NCAA national championship.
Did we say epic? This five-set roller-coaster ride between the Ramblers and their Chicago-area rivals from Lewis University on May 9, 2015 went 21-25, 25-23, 25-15, 25-27, 23-21, with both teams having multiple chances to win the match in the final set.
The championship wasn't decided until Thomas Jaeschke served and Ricky Gevis and Nick Olson teamed for the block that finally ended the long evening at Stanford University. With the win, Loyola became the first program east of the Mississippi River to win consecutive national championships in men's volleyball and just the fourth school in the tournament's history to win back-to-back NCAA titles.
The players have moved on to other things, with some still playing volleyball, professionally and for Team USA. And although it's hard to find time for reminiscing, the second of the two national championships brings back indelible memories.
"Pretty fondly," said Jaeschke, a two-time All-American at Loyola and the American Volleyball Coaches Association (AVCA) National Player of the Year in 2015. "It's probably how most people look back on college. You don't really realize how good you had it and how much fun you were having. Super nostalgic. I saw a post on Twitter about it (recently) and seeing how young we were and how much fun it was."
Shane Davis, the Ramblers head coach for the 2014-15 titles, has moved on to become head coach of the women's team at Northwestern University. The memories of the 2015 championship remain fresh with him.
"I try to reminisce as much as I can sometimes, especially with great teams and especially a team like that in 2015," he said. "I find myself every now and then watching the match on a replay or talking to some of the players or the staff that's on board with that program.
"I just did something (recently) with one of my old assistants, Kris Berzins. We actually watched the match, did kind of a live feed and talked about the match. Even though it's been five years, it's very fresh in our memory and a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to coach a match like that. It was definitely by far the best match that I've been a part of and probably one of the best matches, the final that we've had in the sport."
The road to the title
The Ramblers wound up with a record of 28-2 in the 2015 season. Interestingly, the two losses came during regular-season play against Lewis, a 3-1 loss at home on March 9 and another four-set loss at Lewis on April 1.
Loyola swept Pfeiffer 3-0 on May 5 in an NCAA play-in match. On May 7, the Ramblers beat UC Irvine 3-0 in the national semifinal, setting up the final against Lewis on May 9.
Not only was this a match made in volleyball Valhalla, it was personal for some.
"Oh, man, it was kind of a wild year," said Olson. "We were feeling pretty confident going into the year. We were riding pretty high after we won the previous year. We knew Lewis was going to be good. We didn't know they were going to be that good. We lost to them both times that year. It definitely got under my skin. I can't speak for everyone, but it definitely was frustrating me that we could somehow not beat them."
On the day of the final, Olson said he remembers talking with assistant coach
Mark Hulse, who since ascended to the job of head coach at Loyola.
"Before the match, I was talking to Coach Hulse and he was like, 'So, Nick, what are your feelings about the game?'" Olson recalled. "He was just kind of picking our brains. I'm like, 'It's Lewis. We're supposed to beat them. This isn't a question. We always beat them. At some point, we're going to get into the match, and we will win.'
"So, going into that match, I knew we were going to win. I had no doubt in my mind that we weren't going to lose. Nope. It didn't even seem like an option. In any conceivable universe, we were going to win that match."
Watching video of the final match reveals that Olson was a beast in his role as middle blocker.
"Oh, man, I just wanted to kick their ass," he said. "I wanted to go out and beat them 25-0 each game. I wanted everything. I wanted every point. I wanted blood (laughing). It wasn't just a national championship. It was a national championship against Lewis. It was a little bit more personal than another championship."
The way the match began, it seemed Olson would get his wish. Loyola jumped out to an early 6-1 lead to begin set one, forcing a Lewis timeout. The Ramblers took advantage of four Flyer errors during the stretch, while Jaeschke and Olson each added a service ace. But things weren't going to be this easy for the rest of the match, as the Ramblers quickly discovered.
"We came out hot," Hulse said. "I remember sitting there thinking, 'Man, we're going to win this thing,' 10 minutes into it. And then we lose the first set. I remember thinking, 'Oh my gosh, we're going to lose it.' And then I remember the moment of clarity of, 'Hey, how about you just buckle up and get ready for this thing,' because it was up and down.
"I remember in the end, in the fifth set, I think both teams were out of subs. Both teams were out of timeouts. And we probably played 15-20 more points of volleyball. Then you kind of had this moment of, 'Well, the guys know the deal. They know the report. I have nothing else to add. I'm just going to watch. We'll see what happens here.'"
Like two heavyweight fighters slugging it out, the Ramblers and Flyers went toe to toe for the entire match.
When it was all said and done, Jaeschke wound up leading the Ramblers with 20 kills, while freshman Jeff Jendryk (17 kills) earned the tournament's Most Outstanding Player honors and the AVCA Freshman of the Year. He graduated in 2018 as one of only 12 players in NCAA Division I-II history to be a four-time AVCA All-American and also went on to team with Jaeschke on the U.S. National Team.
How the Ramblers did it
So many factors came together to lift the Ramblers past Lewis. The upperclassmen had the experience of being defending champions. The Ramblers got strong play from every player on the court. And, of course, there is that little matter of luck, which all winning teams will gladly accept.
"If you watch that video, you see those older guys grabbing the other ones by the jersey or point to their heart or whatever it may be," Davis said. "But we just had some really good culture back then and some really good leadership with the group that we had.
"And luck goes along with it, right? A lot of things have got to go your way. When you watch that match, we had 13 or 14 national championship points. Lewis had nine or something like that. I'm sure it gets inflated with each story I tell. You talk about inches. There's many moments were Lewis could have won the national championship. There are a lot of moments before that where we could have won. It was really a game of inches during some of those moments. It was just our guys who were just a little bit better in the end than their guys."
Maybe the little things paid off in the end for the Ramblers, little things that might have made a big difference.
"Just the amount of hard work we put into it," Jendryk said. "Those games come down to two points at the end of the day. I don't know. That entire year, every practice we would always do a game to five. No matter what, every practice, play one game to five. I think maybe that mentality of, 'We have to win this fifth set,' I think it really translated to that game.
"It's fun to think about those kinds of games. That national championship was definitely a nail-biter. It's kind of funny. I don't get nervous playing the sport, but watching that game, I get nervous even though I know the outcome."
Jaeschke passed the credit around.
"I think it was just different guys in different moments," he said. "Jeff Jendryk had overall a really good game offensively. I remember Cody Caldwell had a huge block. I don't know if Lewis was swinging for the match, but he blocked their opposite. I think I served the last two points. On match point, I hit a really good serve. Ricky (Gevis) put up a really good block and shut their outside down, and we won the game on that. I just think it was different guys at different moments stepping up throughout the course of the match."
The repeat was especially sweet for Jaeschke, who admitted he had a fire burning inside of him the entire three years he was at Loyola before he turned pro.
"Honestly, I had a pretty big chip on my shoulder in college," he said. "I didn't get recruited by the schools out west. I tried to get recruited by Ohio State and Penn State. I didn't get many looks or much attention. So, I kind of had a bad attitude toward them. There was zero love toward any other school.
"There was a little bit of anger on my end. I was like, 'You guys messed up, and this is why.' We were just running over teams left and right. That felt good, but it wasn't me. It was our team. I really think we worked hard. I think my class started to build a different work ethic on the team, a different environment and change things for the better."
The legacy
Certainly there have been memorable moments in the history of sports at Loyola Chicago. The 1963 national championship in men's basketball has been the standard setter for many Rambler fans. The Final Four run by the men's basketball team in 2018 generated newfound excitement at and about Loyola, and recent years have seen other men's and women's programs making their marks.
But for sheer excitement, tension and drama, the 2015 men's volleyball title deserves its own special place in Loyola lore.
"Obviously, the '63 national championship, I've see the highlights of that, the comeback," Hulse said. "It's right there, yeah, especially. I think what's cool for volleyball, we'd get on ESPN once a year, and it's our final.
"The number of people who I think saw it and experienced collegiate volleyball for the first time through that match who were maybe flipping through the channels that night, I think about those folks. That's the first time they've seen men's volleyball, they must think it's the best sport ever, and every match must be this exciting. Or the non-volleyball fan, I thought that transcended not just volleyball but any sports fan had to enjoy that one."
Hulse's former boss Davis was a standout volleyball player at Loyola, and he was inducted into the university's Athletics Hall of Fame in 2019, an honor he says gives him chills just thinking about that honor. He said the back-to-back national titles prove something else about Loyola.
"You can see that at a school like Loyola, you can win a national championship, right?" he said. "The men's basketball team proved that, 'Hey we can win a national championship; we got to the Final Four.' I think it just shows that if you get the right staff, you get the right people, you recruit the right kind of kids, you can win a national championship.
"And I think Loyola is somewhere special. I loved being there. It holds a special part, with my own college playing career there. It was something special. Going to a Set 5, winning 23-21, in extra innings, and being able to win it is pretty wild."
It seems, though, that modesty prevents the players and staff members from 2015 claiming credit as the forerunners of recent sports success at Loyola, all across the board. Instead, they sought to frame their legacy as one part of the university community as a whole.
"I just think if you see men's volleyball winning two national championships and you're a volleyball player, you might be like, 'Wow, that might be a good place to go,'" Jaeschke said. "Same with basketball and soccer. You start to see Loyola Chicago getting more screen time all over the place. You might not realize that it's slowly getting embedded in your mind that it's a decent sports school. I think the group effort from everyone really helps with that. I don't know that we were necessarily the start."
Jendryk also pointed to another hallmark of Loyola student-athletes: excellence in the classroom.
"Loyola is a great school," he said. "We have great coaching and all that good stuff. People are wanting to go to Loyola not just because of athletics but also because of the academcs. That was honestly a big reason why I went.
"I think it's good. Being able to go to that school and just trying to prove to yourself and prove to others. It's a great school, and it's awesome that we were the first kind of leg to get everything going. I think no matter what, Loyola has some great athletes who are going to school there. They're just wanting to find an opportunity to prove themselves."
As the current caretaker of the men's volleyball program, Hulse said he looks at recent sports success at Loyola as part of an overall investment.
"I think we're all benefiting from the same thing," he said. "We were the first to reap the success of it. But one to one, it's correlated where Loyola invested a lot in the university, not just in athletics. If you're an alum and you walk around the place, it looks a little different than it did even 10 or 15 years ago. What we were able to do with those guys who were on that roster, we recruited them as Gentile (Arena) was being built. We recruited them with the Norville Center as a brand-new facility and the Damen Student Center being opened, showing them the new dorms.
"I think basketball, soccer and the other programs have found success, especially in the last few years, and it all happened as a result of some of the investment that Loyola has made in itself. It's always been an outstanding university, but I think some of those changes, those improvements that have been made over the last 10-15 years, have made a world of difference in athletics and the quality of the student-athlete who is coming through the doors.
"You combine that with men's volleyball being a unique sport where the Loyola's of the world can compete for national championships year in and year out, I think we were the first, but there will be many others because it's a pretty special place even more so than it was maybe 10 years ago."
Bruce Miles is a 1979 graduate of the Loyola University Chicago College of Arts and Sciences. He worked for the Daily Herald in Arlington, Heights, Illinois, from 1988-2019. He served as the Herald's beat writer covering the Chicago Cubs from 1998-2019.
