Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, November 30, 1993 TAG: 9311300070
SECTION: CURRENT PAGE: NRV-1 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
SOURCE: RALPH BERRIER JR. STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: RADFORD LENGTH: Long
In the spring of 1972, Dobbins was in her fourth year of teaching physical education at Radford University, then Radford College, when three of her students asked if she would coach the school's volleyball team.
There were only two problems: 1) the school didn't actually have a volleyball team and 2) Dobbins had never coached volleyball in her life.
"I didn't know a thing about power volleyball," Dobbins admitted, "but I had played in the back yard. They begged me until I gave in. My thought was we'll have a team one year and that will be the end of it."
Two decades later, Jannell Dobbins is finally retiring as Radford's volleyball coach.
Before she can recline in the rocking chair the university presented her last month, Dobbins has one final chore on her to-do list. She has to coach her team in the NCAA championship tournament this week.
It is tough job, to be sure, leaving wintry Radford for sunny Los Angeles to coach Wednesday's first-round match against the University of Southern California, the No. 13 team in the nation.
"I hear it's nice out there now," Dobbins quipped.
Radford began California dreaming on Nov. 14, when the Highlanders won the Big South Conference Tournament championship at Winthrop University in Rock Hill, S.C., gaining an automatic berth to the national tournament.
Making the NCAA field is a storybook ending for Dobbins, who has the most wins of any coach in Radford history. Dobbins, who took a three-year hiatus from coaching in 1986-88, has a won-lost record of 369-218 in 19 seasons.
When Radford competed in the small-college Association of Intercollegiate Athletics for Women, the Highlanders won state championships in 1980 and 1981. During the mid-1980s, her teams were Division II powers. In 1985, the year before Radford moved up to major-college Division I status, her team posted a best-ever 31-14 record and was ranked in the Top 5 of the South Atlantic region.
Still, she saved the best for last.
"There's no question, [going to the NCAA tournament] was our No. 1 goal," said Dobbins, who also won the Big South championship in 1990.
Dobbins, who won't reveal her age (sources say she is in her 50s), is one of the few people who has stayed involved in Radford athletics since its beginnings. Under the guidance of university President Donald Dedmon, who has been at Radford since 1972, and Chuck Taylor, the school's athletic director since 1974, Radford has grown from an all-women's college to a coeducational university that has more than 9,000 students and fields 17 varsity sports teams that play in the $8.5 million Dedmon Center Complex.
She is a Radford native whose family has close ties to the school. Her husband, Don, received his master's degree from Radford and has been the public-address announcer at basketball games for years. Both her children, daughter Connie and son Chris, attended Radford.
She is also widely known as one of the nicest, most polite college coaches of all time.
"I've often told her she's too nice to be a coach," said Taylor.
"She can be very soft-spoken, but you know she's driven to win," said Anne Fontaine, a senior player from Wytheville. "She goes all out."
Dobbins' teams have been successful off the court, as well. Year in and year out, her teams have had the highest grade-point averages of any Radford team. Last year, it had a 3.3 grade point average for the year. Dobbins rarely recruits students who have less than a 2.5 average in high school. Almost everyone who played for her has graduated.
"I just don't give lip service [to academics]," she said. "It's for real."
That's because she was a teacher before she was a coach. After graduating from Auburn High School, she attended Radford and then returned to Auburn to teach and coach basketball. She became a physical education teacher at Radford in 1968.
When Dobbins began coaching in 1972, Radford was a tightly knit home to 3,670 students, all female. The school had embarked on the burgeoning world of women's intercollegiate athletics in 1971 when Pat Barrett coached the first basketball team.
The following spring, the three students coerced Dobbins into coaching volleyball. All three - Jan Harris, Debbie Sherman Lee and Sandy Mills - later became volleyball coaches.
"We just wanted to play," said Lee, a teacher in Christiansburg. "We weren't thinking, `Maybe this team will go to the nationals one day.' "
Other than hand-me-down sweatsuits from the basketball team, the 1972 volleyball team bought its own uniforms (light purple T-shirts with dark purple iron-on numerals and letters). Later volleyball teams wore the basketball team's uniforms.
Dobbins, who wasn't paid for coaching the team until 1975, had no assistant. She drove the team van - a hideous lime-covered elongated station wagon affectionately dubbed the "Green Dragon" - did the laundry, made out the schedule and helped pack lunches when the team traveled.
The first team went 3-3. In 1979, Andi Lawler of Virginia Beach became the program's first scholarship player when Dobbins gave all her $1,000 in scholarship money that year to Lawler, who became the best player on Radford's powerful teams in the early 1980s.
This year, 11 of 12 players receive some sort of athletic scholarship. Every player receives uniforms, shoes and meal money for away matches.
"Now, because of the money, [playing volleyball] is more like a job," said Dobbins. "But if we weren't getting [proper funding] we would not have won this championship."
Dobbins stepped down from coaching after the 1985 season, Radford's last in Division II. The program continued its successes, but it also had three different coaches in three years. She was begged into coaching volleyball again, this time by Taylor. In five seasons since then, she has experienced her greatest success, capped by a squad this year that boasts seven seniors and has become one of Dobbins' favorite teams.
She plans to remain as a teacher for another year or so, then she'll kick back in that rocking chair.
"I'd like to be remembered as a coach who cared about athletics and academics and as a teacher who cared about students," she said. "I'd like to be remembered both ways."
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by CNB