SAULT STE. MARIE – For the first time in 34 years, Lake Superior State volleyball coach Mark Engle won't spend the winter preparing for next season. He'll be primed for the spring perch run, but is leaving off-season preparations to someone else.

Engle, a volleyball coach since 1976, announced his retirement from coaching after 16 seasons with the Lakers. He will officially step down in February, and a search for a new head coach will begin immediately, LSSU Director of Athletics Kris Dunbar announced today.

Engle, who was a standout prep basketball and baseball player, developed a passion for volleyball on the Holland area beaches in the 1970s. His first coaching stint was with the Zeeland Middle School seventh-grade team.

“I was playing competitively indoors when the beach game took off in Western Michigan,” Engle said. “June of 1978 was the first year I played in a high level beach tournament in Muskegon.”

Beach volleyball played a big role in the progression of Engle's coaching career. Ironically, he's leaving the sport as beach volleyball is taking off at the NCAA level.

“The sand game will help college sports in general, but what happens to the northern climate schools?” Engle said. “It's a big controversy now – how to dole out scholarships, how many players can play both sports (indoor and sand). You can compare the issue to football players who also run track.”

Engle will continue to follow the evolution of both sports, especially while his son and daughter-in-law continue their pro beach careers.

“It's a different world for me now,” Engle said. “Looking back on everything I've done, I have a lot of good memories. I did what I thought I was going to do. I didn't reach all of my goals, but I did reach some. There's a trend that the age of college coaches has gone way down. I'm 62 years old. How many Joe Paternos are there going to be? I'd have to coach another 22 years to get there. I can't imagine that.”

During his four-decade tenure, Engle has proudly contributed to the Title IX era of women's athletics. He was part of the women's volleyball boom in southwest Michigan, which is the state's hotbed of the sport. His impact on the sport in the Upper Peninsula was even greater.

“I helped build the first four beach courts at Holland State Park,” said Engle, who credits maverick Pete Johnson for being Michigan's beach volleyball pioneer. “It grew from four courts to 50, and over 200 teams were coming to Holland for tournaments…We were right in that Title IX time frame. There was a huge transformation going on.”

Mark and Esther Engle took ownership of Les Cheneaux Landing resort in August, 1982. Engle returned to Holland to coach the West Ottawa High School team during the 1982-83 season, then moved to the U.P. permanently in 1983. He began coaching at Cedarville High School as an assistant during the 1983-84 season.

Engle coached at CHS until his oldest daughter, Ellie, graduated in 1995. During that time, he had beach courts going at his resort and throughout the Les Cheneaux area. It wasn't hard to get high school players to spend the off-season at the beach, and the extra competition paid big dividends for the Trojans. He brought high-level tournaments to the Cedarville area and created opportunities for his players to train with and compete against top-level players. Cedarville went on to win four U.P. state titles and earned a No. 1 statewide ranking despite being ineligible for the statewide tournament. U.P. teams finally competed in their first MHSAA state tournament in 2000.

“We had high school kids playing against older, higher level people, and that's when we started to win,” Engle said. “That led to higher expectations…Every time a coach (of any high school team) got fired up and made some sacrifices so their kids could see a high level of competition, U.P. teams did pretty well. Teams then became very good, dedicated and tight-knit, and expected to win.”

Engle achieved his goal of becoming a college coach when he took over the LSSU program in the fall of 1995. At that time, the Lakers had a 44-match losing streak in the Great Lakes Intercollegiate Athletic Conference. His first team ended that skid and was 2-16 in the GLIAC. The Lakers were 10-9 during his fourth season (1998), which was his best conference mark. The Lakers reached double figures in overall wins five times.

“We had some teams that made the effort and sacrifice to play at a high level in the summertime,” Engle said. “Some of them played sand volleyball in the summer and came back in the fall looking like different players.”

Among those players were his daughters, Ellie and Casey, who were both four-year letter winners at LSSU. Son, Evan, played basketball for the Lakers.

“When I took the job, I wasn't thinking that way,” said Engle of the prospect of coaching his daughters at the college level. “I had in the back of my mind that I could be a college coach. I wanted to see how far I could go. The fact that it evolved the way it did wasn't by plan.”

While Engle sees the quality of U.P. high school volleyball improving, he notes that recruiting was -- and will continue to be – LSSU's biggest challenge.

“If you draw a circle around Sault Ste. Marie, how many Division II players will you find in that 50-mile radius,” Engle said. “Then you go 100 miles, then 200 miles. This is not Grand Rapids, Saginaw or Lansing, where all of those places have training centers. It gets to be an issue.”

Despite the drawbacks of coaching at a remote school with a limited budget (Engle's bus driving exploits are legendary), Engle appreciates the opportunity to coach at LSSU.

“I was used to winning, and I thought I could make a bigger impact in that way,” Engle said. “When I got here, we were on a 44-match losing streak in the GLIAC. It took awhile, but we gradually got better. For quite a few years we were very close to turning the corner.

“But college sports are about the here and now, not what happened before,” he continued. “We've been competitive. We had a lot of high-quality kids come out of here who went on to be successful. They were good representatives of the University. I had to cut corners to make the program work. I'm not alone. So have other coaches here. If you can win in spite of that, it's a feather in your cap.”

Long-time LSSU assistant volleyball coach Joe Susi appreciates Engle's creativity, volleyball knowledge and friendship.

“Obviously we spent a lot of time together,” Susi said. “We'd talk about a bunch of things – volleyball, hunting, his childhood and the places he's lived. He's an interesting guy. A lot of people see him as laid back, but he's also pretty intense. His record might not show it, but he wants to win.”

One of Susi's favorite coaching stories was from a match at Northwood several years ago. The opponent consistently hit balls that were tipping off the LSSU middle blocker's fingers and flying out of bounds. Engle told his team to not block the middle hitter.

“I was thinking, 'Coach, are you crazy?” Susi said. “But we stopped blocking, and everything they hit went out of bounds. We won the game.”

Susi said that Engle always put his players' well-being first. Junior Jeanna Radzinski echoed that statement.

“He told us, 'Nothing good lasts forever,'” Radzinski said of Engle's announcement to the team that he is retiring. “That statement is so true and especially applicable to this situation, because no matter how reluctant any of us are to admit, the fact of the matter is that time is something that eventually runs out and leaves us making that next step in the process. I think the next step will be easier due to having that foundation that Mark gave us.

“He really cared about us and that is the thing about him that I will remember most. He drove an hour to work every single day and put his heart and a great deal of effort into his team. I am so happy and proud that I got to be part of that team. This group of girls is so close, and I think that this bond formed from Mark's coaching. We never stopped laughing with him. We will forever recall his funny jokes or the hilarious one-liners he would say in the huddles.”

And, to quote one of Engle's infamous salutations said while driving the team bus out of the Norris Center parking at the beginning of what was probably a 14-hour trip, “OK squirrels, let's go nuts.”

Click here to Read Jeanna Radzinski complete tribute to Coach Engle

Click here for a tribute from Lindsay McLeod