EIU caps remarkable turnaround with first NCAA volleyball tourney trip since 2001

After chewing up and spitting out five coaches over 15 years, the women’s volleyball program at Eastern Illinois fell off a cliff in 2019.

The toothless Panthers went 3-26 and 1-15 in the low-major Ohio Valley Conference with an RPI computer ranking of 314, putting them in the bottom 6.2% of NCAA Division I’s 335 teams.

Into that quagmire stepped Sara Thomas, embracing the challenge of flipping the script of futility in her first go at the helm of a college team.

Eastern Illinois volleyball had known painfully little success since its last appearance in the NCAA Tournament in 2001. But four years after taking on a seemingly hopeless job, Thomas has kicked EIU’s mud of losing off of her shoes.

Her Panthers won 28 of their 32 matches this year, finished first by a three-match margin in the OVC during the regular season with a 15-3 record, and roared through the conference tournament with three consecutive sweeps to earn its automatic bid to the NCAA Tournament.

Awaiting about a two-hour drive east from Charleston in West Lafayette, Indiana, is a first-round Thursday date with Marquette of the Big East Conference at Purdue’s Holloway Gymnasium. Conventional wisdom might dictate that this likely would be the final chapter in Eastern Illinois’ feel-good story, but that would overlook one salient detail: Thomas’ Panthers have a sweep of Missouri on their 2023 resume, those same Tigers out of the SEC who also earned an NCAA bid.

Missouri (17-12) has an RPI of 34. Marquette (20-10) was an at-large selection after being the regular-season Big East co-champion with a 16-2 record. The Golden Eagles’ RPI is 25. Marquette coach Ryan Theiss, then pretty much fresh out of college, was an assistant at EIU the last time it played in the NCAA tourney.

Eastern Illinois moved up to 65 in the latest RPI released this week, but that victory over the tradition-rich Tigers in mid-September should stamp the Panthers as live “undercats” on a neutral…