Lori DeJongh-Slight, a 1989 Luverne High School graduate, poses with the family pet for a recent photograph in her Boone, Iowa, home. DeJongh-Slight is head coach of the Des Moines Area Community College volleyball team, which plays at the National Junior College Athletic Association Tournament in Toledo, Ohio, today through Saturday.
By John Rittenhouse
Lori DeJongh easily could have disassociated herself with volleyball after a disheartening high school experience, but she didn't.
After making the Luverne High School roster as a junior in 1987, DeJongh and another senior classmate were victims of a numbers crunch that led them to being cut from the team.
Instead of giving up on volleyball, DeJongh showed some intestinal fortitude and accepted the offer to serve as Luverne’s student manager for the 1988 season.
More than one decade later, boosters of the Des Moines Area Community College volleyball program on the Boone Campus are glad the 1989 LHS graduate did not give up on the sport.
Now known as Lori DeJongh-Slight, daughter of Luverne's Norm and Norma DeJongh, she has led the DMACC Lady Bears to its first berth in the National Junior College Athletic Association Tournament as program's head coach.
“We leave for Toledo, Ohio, Wednesday (yesterday), where the national tournament will be played,” DeJongh-Slight said, from her DMACC office Friday.
“The tournament will be played Nov. 14-16, and there will be 12 teams there from all over the nation. We would need to win seven matches to become national champions.”
All things considered, it’s amazing the Lady Bears have made a national name for themselves at this stage of the game.
DeJongh-Slight was hired to start the volleyball program for DMACC in 1999. Now, four years later, the Lady Bears are contending for a national championship.
“This is gratifying,” the coach offered. “It's not like they brought me in to take over a team that was bad. We built this program from scratch. We made it to the region tournament that first year, and we've been slowly chipping away at it, getting better and better, and now we've won our first regional championship.
“I give the credit for our improvement to our girls and the people we have working for the volleyball program. We've gone from non-existence to a national power in four years.”
DMACC brought DeJongh-Slight into the fold to build a quality program, and she did it with little coaching experience at the junior college level.
After a short stay as a student at Northwestern College (Orange City, Iowa), DeJongh-Slight enrolled at Iowa State University in Ames, where she said her interest in coaching bloomed. After her stay in Ames, DeJongh-Slight enrolled at Buena Vista University (Storm Lake, Iowa), where she took a job as an assistant volleyball coach.
DeJongh-Slight gave up her assistant duties at Buena Vista to take head-coaching positions at Colo-Nesco, Aurelia and Storm Lake High Schools in the 1990s before taking over the post at DMACC in 1999.
As expected, DMACC struggled during a 3-20 initial season in 1999, but three conference wins allowed the Lady Bears to advance to their first regional tournament that year.
The team made a dramatic improvement in 2000, when it compiled a 19-20 record before placing fourth in its conference. The program took another positive stride in 2001, finishing tied for third in the regional tournament and compiling a 29-19 record.
The first three seasons set up a breakthrough 2002 campaign.
The Lady Bears finished second in their conference and went 5-0 to win their first region championship. In order to win the region title, DMACC had to knock off four-time defending champion Kirkwood Community College, of Cedar Rapids, Iowa.
“Kirkwood won our region the last four years, and we ended up beating them in three games. We fell behind 7-1 in the first game, but we came back to tie the game at seven. We ended up winning that game and never trailed during the rest of the match,” DeJongh-Slight said.
DMACC will enter the national tournament as the nation's No. 3-ranked team with a 47-7 record, and the coach hopes that will lead to No. 3 seed for the 12-team event.
The competition will be tough, but DeJongh-Slight believes her team made up of one athlete from Minnesota (Kasson), two from Bucharest, Romania, and 12 from Iowa can make a run at a national title.
“It's going to be tough, because there will be a lot of good teams in Toledo. We're hoping our experience will pull us through. We've played against a lot of Division JCCAA Division 1 teams this year, so we're thinking we have a little more competitive experience than some of the other teams have,” she concluded.