The best coach in Big East volleyball has chosen to pursue other opportunities, and that cracks the door WIDE open for Marquette and new head coach Tom Mendoza.
Creighton dropped a bomb on Big East volleyball on Sunday evening, firing off a press release that’s timestamped at 6:41pm, announcing that Kirsten Bernthal Booth is resigning as the Bluejays’ head volleyball coach, effective immediately. According to the press release, Booth is making this move “to pursue opportunities outside of coaching.” No word on what exactly that means, of course.
Ryan Theis leaving Marquette for Florida earlier this year was going to send shockwaves through the Big East as a volleyball league, but the effect of Theis and Booth departing in the same offseason can’t possibly be calculated or quantified at this point. Booth walks away with a record of 502-192 as Creighton’s head coach and the Bluejays haven’t lost more than five matches in a season since 2017. They went to the NCAA tournament in every season since 2012, and went to the Elite 8 in each of the last two years. Creighton won 12 straight regular season Big East titles and 11 conference tournament titles in that time, including each of the last six in a row.
Short version: I have been very clear about pointing out that Marquette volleyball is the Best Team On Campus for several years, and as good as Marquette has been under the direction of Ryan Theis, Creighton has been better than the Golden Eagles at nearly every turn. That’s what we’re talking about with Booth’s resignation.
And so, the mind turns to wondering how all of this affects Marquette. We’ll have to wait and see how things work out on the court this fall, but for the Big East in general, not just Marquette, this is a gigantic opportunity.
I did the research: New Marquette head coach Tom Mendoza has the most NCAA tournament appearances out of any of the 11 Big East head coaches. Two with High Point and four with South Carolina means he has six total since 2016, and that means he’s doing better than Joanne Persico at St. John’s, who is running second in the league now.
She has three as the only coach in St. John’s history: 2006, 2007, and 2019.
That 2019 tourney appearance for the Johnnies is the last time a Big East team that’s not Creighton or Marquette made the NCAA tournament. In fact, the nine teams in the league that aren’t CU or MU have just sixteen NCAA tournament appearances in their history, no matter what conference they were in at the time. St. John’s is the only one of the nine to have ever won an NCAA tournament match before now, and Persico got all three of her wins in 2006 and 2007.
Yes, that means that Tom Mendoza’s two NCAA tournament wins in 2018 and 2019 give him the second most amongst any active head coach in the Big East.
Last thing that I thought about with this news out of Omaha: The timing of Booth’s resignation does mean that Creighton was probably going to have to just promote associate head coach Brian Rosen to take over the program. The season ended in December, and even Marquette’s hiring of Mendoza in early March was a little bit weirdly timed due to the late-ish in the calendar retirement of Florida legend Mary Wise. I can’t help but wonder if Mendoza would have been a candidate at Creighton if Booth’s resignation had come closer to the end of the season, perhaps right after New Year’s or so. After all, he was a Booth assistant at Creighton for six years, including the Bluejays’ first three in the Big East. If he was interested in moving on from the Gamecocks, then it’s reasonable to wonder if he would have taken the CU job if they got to him first.
And now we wait for the Big East preseason poll in August. Who knows what the Big East coaches are going to think about how to sort out the expectations for this league?
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