Earlier this fall, the Long Beach State women’s volleyball team welcomed the alumni of the 1972 and 1973 championship winning teams to The Walter Pyramid to celebrate the 50th anniversary of their dynastic run.
There was a buzz inside the arena that night as the women responsible for two of the banners hung in the rafters of the Pyramid were honored on the court. A special video tribute dedicated to them featured the head coach of the then “49ers” from 1972-1984, Dixie Grimmett.
“Back when I called Long Beach newspaper to report our win and the names of the girls that had won I was told, ‘They didn’t think they had room in the newspaper for us. It wasn’t very newsworthy,’ not many people followed volleyball at that point,” Grimmett said.
As unfortunate as the situation was, it was the harsh reality for women’s sports at the time. They had gone undefeated 33-0 en route to their first Association for Intercollegiate Athletics for Women championship.
The team then followed it up by going 33-2 in their title defense on the way to back-to-back AIAW championships.
A two-year stretch of going a combined 66-2, was deemed not newsworthy enough even to make local newspapers. Members of the team remained resilient and never let the lack of media coverage get to them, letting their game on the court speak for themselves.
Even before the ladies brought championships to Long Beach, the campus was at the center of a volleyball revolution. Starting in 1970 when Long Beach State hosted the very first national collegiate volleyball championship in what’s now known as the Gold Mine.
“The significance of this is that this university is like the genesis of intercollegiate women’s volleyball,” setter for the 1973 championship team Robbie Stuart said.
The coaching staff during the early years did not lack any star power as Dr. Frances Schaafsma was at the helm for the first seven seasons and was looked at as a barn-storming volleyball clinician.
“She was the coach if you want to equate it to any top coaches, he was among the caliber of a John Wooden,” Stuart said about the hall-of-fame head coach.
Olympian Ann Heck took over for the 1968 season and then Grimmett, who coached The Beach for 13 seasons. “There’s this richness of Olympians that were at this university before volleyball was an Olympic sport,” Stuart said.
Along with the top-tier coaching corps came an elite group of players that dominated their way to trips to the final four in six of the first seven seasons of the women’s volleyball tournament.
Among these superb athletes was Jill Goldberg who made trips to the final four in every year of her college career at LBSU.
“Looking back at it, we didn’t know during those days that we were the pioneers of the sport, it wasn’t till later on when we realized that,” Goldberg said.
Setter Jeanine Prindle was an all-around athlete who played softball and didn’t start to play volleyball until her time at Cerritos College where she learned the sport.
She tried out for the team with around 100 other women but was one of the lucky few to make the team. Early games in her career looked slightly different as they began with timed games.
“It blows my mind now knowing that there were no scholarships, we had to fundraise for tournaments, no athletic trainers,” Prindle said. “I am really happy to see how the progression of women’s sports and how things have changed with the viewership of the NCAA.”
Last week marked another huge milestone for women’s sports at The Beach as the inaugural Big West women’s volleyball tournament was hosted at the Pyramid for a bid in the NCAA tournament.
“It’s always nice to come back and see, and to know I was a part of something so big at this school and know we left such a big impact, so it’s heartwarming,” Goldberg said.