Ever since women’s volleyball coach Steve Shondell’s extension talks began, it was never a question of where he wanted to be.
“I told [athletic director] Bill [Scholl] from the beginning that the only place I’m ever going to be is at Ball State,” Shondell said. “When my tenure is finished at Ball State I won’t be coaching college or high school anymore.”
Shondell confirmed via text message to the Daily News he signed an extension early Tuesday before Ball State announced the three-year extension in a news release.
Shondell’s new contract will continue through Jan. 31, 2016, with a first-year salary of $89,000, including performance incentives, Scholl said.
Scholl said the agreement was “a bit anti-climatic” because a verbal agreement was reached in the middle of Ball State’s fall season.
Shondell has led Ball State to a 63-30 record in his first three years as coach including a NCAA Tournament bid in the 2011 season.
The AVCA Hall of Fame coach made it clear he’s willing to coach as long as the program is still successful.
“When it gets to the point where I feel like we’re not producing like we need to, then it will be time for someone else to take over,” Shondell said. “But hopefully that won’t be for at least a while. I just want what’s best for the university.”
Scholl said the Muncie community and Ball State tradition means high expectations for Shondell and the women’s volleyball program.
“When you are looking for programs to kind of serve as your signature programs, I think you would be silly to not think about volleyball potentially as one of those programs,” he said.
Shondell said his first goal going into a new contract is to improve the team’s health after issues in 2012.
Ball State is coming off a 14-17 season in which it was knocked out in the first round of the Mid-American Conference tournament, but it dealt with multiple injuries to key players throughout the season.
“I lost four key players for a good part of the year,” he said. “We never really kind of became the team we could have been had we had all of our players [healthy].”
The struggles didn’t affect the extension talks because Scholl said he understood the circumstances.
“It was clearly a year with some very unusual circumstances involving that team relative to the injury side of things,” Scholl said. “His record this year did not cause me hesitation.”
Thanks to a new deal, Ball State gets to keep the Shondell coaching legacy alive with someone who puts Ball State first.
“He loves Ball State,” Scholl said. “There is no question how passionate he is about Ball State, about Ball State volleyball and about volleyball.”
