Crissy Jones Schoonderwoerd is the first Black assistant volleyball coach at Minnesota since the late Maurice “Mo” Batie, who died unexpectedly of cardiac arrest in 2000 while playing basketball on campus at age 36. He was a Gopher assistant for four seasons with the late head coach Mike Hebert, who he followed to Minnesota when Hebert got hired from Illinois in 1996.
Jones Schoonderwoerd is one of only three Black assistant volleyball coaches in the Big Ten this season. She came to Minnesota after a season at California as its interim head coach, and led the squad to an undefeated 11-0 non-conference record and 16-15 overall.
She was previously on the staff as an assistant when the Cal coach unexpectedly resigned. “When I was presented with that opportunity,” recalled the first-year Minnesota assistant, “it happened two weeks before the season started. So, I didn’t really have a choice.
“But I really trusted a few things,” continued Jones Schooderwoerd. “I had a lot of success as a player, which was really great for me to learn the mechanics of the game. I’ve had great beach coaches, great indoor coaches, and have learned so much.
“The coaches that I’ve had have been some of the most influential people in my life,” she pointed out. This includes Minnesota HC Keegan Cook, who coached Jones Schooderwoerd for four seasons at Washington.
As a player, Jones Schooderwoerd was a three-time All-Pac 12 honoree, an AVCA All-American, and helped Washington twice make the NCAA Elite Eight. She also made beach volleyball All-American when she played at Cal Poly as a graduate student, making her only the second player in NCAA history to earn All-American status in both indoor and beach volleyball.
Jones Schooderwoerd also played three years on the Association of Volleyball Professionals beach volleyball circuit, was a 2019 Rookie of the Year nominee, and played for Team USA on the International Volleyball Federation (FIVB) world beach volleyball tour.
One might naturally assume that coaching would be next for Jones Schooderwoerd, but according to her, that wasn’t necessarily the case.
“I think I thought about coaching,” she admitted. “I was a graduate assistant coach for a beach volleyball program at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo. It was short because it was Covid season, but I really loved it. That was the first time I really thought about coaching.
“But once I stopped playing professionally,” she continued, “I was watching volleyball every single day. My husband said, ‘Babe, you got to get out of Human Resources, you’re still very interested in volleyball.”
“That’s kind of when I found that if I wasn’t playing volleyball, I needed to be involved in some capacity, because I couldn’t get away from it,” said Jones Schooderwoerd.
Jones Schooderwoerd was hired in January. The Long Beach, Calif. native and her husband packed up and relocated to the Midwest, where the weather can be unpredictable.
“That was one of my big questions when I met [Coach Cook and others at the school]. What is this gonna be? Do I need to get snow chains? What jacket do I need? I had to ask all these questions.”
Nonetheless, the first-year Gopher assistant coach is glad to be here as the team now competes in the new 18-team Big Ten.
“I’m really excited,” she told us last month before the season began. “I think we have a really interesting perspective because these [new] teams that we’re [already] pretty familiar with, Keegan having coached in the Pac-12, myself having played in the Pac-12 and coached in the Pac-12 last season. So, they’re teams that we’re familiar with, and they’re all really great teams.”
Jones Schooderwoerd observed as one of the few Black coaches in the Big Ten, “I definitely have seen an increase in diversity, both with race but also with gender. I feel so grateful every day to get to work here, because our staff does have really great diversity.”