Photo by Chris Drummond: The Marshall 2022 volleyball team poses with their Class AAA State Championship trophy and medals in front of a crowd of students following their win over Margaret-St. Benilde’s in the tournament finals in the Xcel Center on Saturday, November 12, 2022. The win was Marshall’s eighth state tournament win, the most of any school in state history.

The Marshall volleyball program, coming off back-to-back state championships, has been dominant for over 20 years. They’ve finished with at least a share of the Big South conference title every year since 2010 and have finished as the section champion or runner-up all but two seasons since 1997. They are the only high school in Minnesota with eight state championship titles. 

Yet, the Tigers weren’t always the juggernaut of southwest Minnesota the way they are today. Marshall played its inaugural season in the fall of 1974 under head coach Dave Ahmann. 

The head coach of the team for 15 seasons said when he first started coaching, he didn’t have a particularly deep understanding of the game. 

“The good thing about it is that I knew nothing, but all the other coaches were just as dumb as I was. Nobody knew anything about anything,” he said with a laugh.

For Ahmann’s first few years as the Marshall volleyball coach, the team got by through hard work if nothing else. They would spend practices trying to pass the ball as high as they could under the 40-foot ceiling of the Marshall Junior High School gym, a practice that would drive setters crazy, Ahmann said. 

The team finished third in its conference in its first season, but the next two years were less successful. 

“I was like, ‘oh, I can’t take this anymore, we are so bad,'” Ahmann said after his third season as coach, in which the team went 3-4 in conference play. From there, they introduced summer work to the team. 

While coaches weren’t allowed to work with their teams on the specifics of their sports over the summer, conditioning work was allowed. Additionally, the kids would meet up of their own volition to practice in open gyms without the coaches.

“We would lift weights, then they would drive my Jeep to Hy-Vee, buy doughnuts, and then they’d go to Park Side and play a couple of hours in the morning. They’d come back in the afternoon and play for three hours in the afternoon. That was a real special group,” Ahmann said of one of the teams in the late ’80s.

“You can go back 10 years before that, we had Marty Larson and Mary Buysse, God those were hard-working kids… I live in Gilbert, Arizona now, we have 300,000 [people], and the kids here don’t work half as hard as the kids worked in Marshall. They were just a super group of kids.”

The summer work for the kids paid off quickly. The team proceeded to win nine of the next 10 section championships, including a third-place finish at the 1985 Class AA State Championship.

“I really thought we were the best program at Marshall High School,” Ahmann said. “[Marv Clemens and Bobby Bonds of the Independent] just fell in love with our team. They came to every match, took photographs, and the photographer was always there. The football coach would come up to me and complain, ‘you guys get more coverage than the football team!’ That just set us off. The clouds just started getting bigger and bigger.”

From then on, the tradition of Marshall volleyball took off. Elementary schoolers grew up watching the Tigers winning and attending “Meet the Tigers” nights, where the team would stay after the match and sign autographs. 

“I was one of those elementary kids looking up to these girls. That drove me to want to play hard when I got there. I would say that that’s just sustained. You’ve got kids at a young age looking up to these girls and the success that they’ve had. It drives them to work hard and do that when they get to be that age,” said Kelly Jones, who played on the team before graduating in 1990 and currently serves as an assistant coach for the team. 

Jones was nine years younger than her sister who played on the first section championship team in 1977. Additionally, Ahmann was her gym teacher, and he made sure to include a unit on volleyball every year.

Ahmann would keep a running list of who won games in P.E. and, at the end of the year, a prize would be awarded to whoever won the most games.

“That was the biggest, most special box of candy I’ve ever gotten,” Jones said of the prize, adding that she believes that these gym classes helped young kids appreciate the sport from a young age. 

Camps and clinics were a major source of improvement for both players and coaches. Jones cited Southwest Minnesota Juniors, coached by Southwest Minnesota State University’s coach Deb Denbeck, as a tradition that helped bring players from all around the area for some high-level organized volleyball over the summer when they couldn’t practice with their coach.

For the coaches, Ahmann said he would go to clinics with his close friend Terry Culhane, who was the Milroy coach at the time before moving on to SMSU for 18 years and currently serves as an assistant coach for Marshall. 

“Terry and I, we just made up our mind that we were going to go to all kinds of things and learn as much as we could. That really helped us getting those kids to play in the summer,” Ahmann said. “We went to [Minneapolis and St. Paul] a couple of times when the men’s and women’s Olympic coaches were there. The men’s and women’s NCAA coaches were there. The Canadian Olympic coaches were there. So we got exposed to so many great coaches.”

“I just sat there and I felt like they were talking in Russian because I didn’t understand anything,” Culhane said jokingly. “Dave and I were good friends, he kind of helped me through the process, that’s kind of how it all worked out for me.”

Culhane was inducted into the Minnesota Volleyball Coaches Association Hall of Fame in 1997.

In 2000, Dan Westby took over the head coaching position, a position which he transitioned into seamlessly. The team had finished as the 2AA Section Champion and 2AAA runner-up in the two years prior to Westby’s arrival, but they ascended to the next level shortly after.

The Tigers finished as the Class AAA runner-up–the best finish in program history–in Westby’s third year at the helm. They secured their first state championship in 2004. 

“We were fortunate enough to have six seniors that year, along with a lot of stronger younger kids. Winning that first one meant a lot,” Amber Buysse, a player on that team and current assistant coach, said. “We’d come in during the summer, just like the girls do now, three days a week. I just think through strong coaching and through girls being dedicated that we were able to continue to get better and form all of our strengths together to win that first one.”

The work ethic of the players on the team has been a through line for Marshall’s success over nearly five decades now. 

“Those kids have so much respect [for Westby] and want to work hard for him. Those results show,” Jones said. “There was something this year that these kids that I was like, ‘they wouldn’t do that if it wasn’t Mr. Westby asking them.'”

Following a four-day stretch at an SMSU volleyball camp, as well as a three-day state softball tournament for some of the players, the team immediately traveled to Sioux Falls, where they played in a tournament and won it for the first time. From there, they went up to a Minnesota High School League coaching clinic and served as demonstrators for Westby for two days.

“They didn’t have to go up to that coaches clinic, but Mr. Westby asked them to, so they all jumped on board and said, ‘yeah, we’ll do it,'” Jones said. “It’s just a really good culture that he’s created and got the kids to buy into really working hard for each other.”

Part of the reason the team is able to buy in is that the proof is in the pudding. After Marshall waited 40 years for its first state championship, they only had to wait for another three for their second. From 2004 to 2013, the team won six state titles. They made it to the championship match every year except for 2006 and 2010, finishing third in the tournament in both of those years.

“I can’t tell you how proud I am of Dan and what he’s doing and how hard he works. I thought I worked my tail off, but Dan just makes me look like the laziest guy in the world,” Ahmann said, saying that Dan could find a way to scout any team in the country if they ended up on his schedule. 

After a seven-year drought without a state volleyball title–oh, the horror–the team seems to be in the midst of a second dynasty. Following a runner-up finish in 2019 and the cancellation of the tournament in 2020, the Tigers are back to their winning ways with consecutive championships again. Despite losing some seniors following their 2021 run, the group came into 2022 with a championship-or-bust mentality. 

Their play on the court certainly backed up their goals, as they didn’t drop a set to a team in Class AAA all season. While the team may be losing several key pieces this offseason, the Tigers will find a way to overcome it, because there are three certainties in life: death, taxes, and the Tigers finding their way back to the section championship match.