After consecutive seasons that finished in the NCAA Division III Championship’s Elite Eight, head coach Jon Ellmann was able to lead his team over the hump and win the program’s first title in school history.
“I’m on cloud nine you know,” Jon Ellmann said. “You think about all the seasons, where you don’t end with the victory at the end, and it just validates a whole lot of things. So, we’re (the team) processing a lot.”
Before coming to UW Oshkosh as an assistant coach for the program in 2016, he was already familiar with the campus being an alumnus of the school.
In 1999, Ellmann began his coaching career at Gibraltar High School, where he’d coach the girl’s freshman and junior varsity teams before getting a job as the assistant varsity coach at Lourdes Academy in 2004.
After one year he’d be promoted to the head volleyball coach at Lourdes and would go on to coach there until 2015.
That’s when he’d make his return to the Oshkosh campus, this time as the women’s volleyball team’s top assistant coach.
Similar to his tenure at Lourdes, Ellmann would find himself as the interim head coach in 2017.
The team won seven of their last eight matches that season and fell in the semi-final round of the Wisconsin Intercollegiate Athletic Conference (WIAC) championship.
Now in eight seasons as the Titans head coach, he’s accrued a 208-69 record with a NCAA D-III championship, a WIAC championship, the 2023 American Volleyball Coaches Association’s NCAA D-III Coach of the Year award, and the first coach in WIAC history to earn four consecutive Coach of the Year honors.
“The culture piece is the biggest thing for us, it’s how we operate,” he said. “This whole national championship run validated that doing the right things for the right reasons can result in a national championship.”
Ellmann says goal setting, building a fulfilling operation, and finding the right people to join the UWO volleyball family was the driving force for the success of the team under his reign.
“It was like, how do you want to operate in a way that’s sustainable and really rewarding,” he said. “… it’s support first, and its whole human first, volleyball is this thing that our kids do, but it’s surely not all of their life, right? And so, if volleyball is bad one day, do they have enough other things going on in their life, and do they feel the support that they can still have a really fulfilling experience for that week, that month.”
Next year’s goal will obviously be to defend their national championship in the 2026 season, but he wants his team to stay levelheaded as the storm cools down from their big win.
“When people come on a recruiting visit, we don’t talk about wins, we talk about what the experience is like, and what you’re going to feel and how you can be the most productive in the process,” Ellmann said.” “I think this (winning the championship) reinforces that we will double down on that approach. We’re not going to talk a lot about winning national championships. It’ll be a known goal, but everything will go back to what it takes to be really good humans and supportive and do really hard things, consistently.”
