By Mark Schnabel
Newton Kansan
A pioneer of sorts at Bethel College, Judy Goertzen was a member of a team that came closer than any other in school history to winning a national champion.
Goertzen, a member of both the volleyball and basketball teams at Bethel, helped lead the Thresher volleyball team to a third-place finish in 1981.
She will be honored Saturday as a member of the inaugural class of the Bethel College Athletic Hall of Fame.
"I was excited and humbled to be in the group of people I was in -- with Otto Unruh and John Muthama and the others," Goertzen said. "It's an honor. I have to represent the females."
Today, Goertzen is a social worker at Friendly Acres, a position she has served in for the last 10 years.
She said the key to success for both her and the volleyball team while she played was the ability to blend a lot of different personalities together for a common goal.
"It was just a lot of hard work, especially in volleyball," she said. "It was just the amount of focused attention we had to have as a team to accomplish the goals. (Then volleyball coach) Diane Flickner led us through that. My senior year, we were 52-5. It was a lot of hard work, but very rewarding."
She said one of the biggest highlights of her playing career was a tournament at the University of Tulsa, which also included Division I schools such as Oral Roberts and The University of Kansas. A prohibitive underdog, Bethel won the tournament.
"We were invited at the last minute because a team canceled out," Goertzen said. "Diane had talked to us just a few days before, knowing we would probably get beat a few times. We ended up winning the thing. So here's little Bethel College coming into this big tournament with Oral Roberts, (then Division I) West Texas State and KU and we ended up winning. It was very unexpected."
She said another highlight came her freshman year, beating Emporia State in a five-game, near-three-hour match at the Kansas Association of Intercollegiate Athletics for Women state tournament.
"Emporia State was planning to go on to the regional tournament," Goertzen said. "We ended up knocking them out of the tournament. That was Diane's first year coaching. It was also the start of the momentum that kept going from there."
At the 1981 National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics national tournament, the Threshers were seeded sixth but finished third, losing to eventual national champions Hawaii-Hilo.
"We wish we could have played them more than once," she said. "Their style of play was so different. It took us a while to get used to it and by the time we did, it was all over. It was really exciting to be there with other teams from all over the United States. We ended up playing St. John's of New York. ... We just felt like, 'Here we are, little Bethel College with just 500 students.' "
She said Bethel was one of about two teams that had to drive. The remainder of the squads got to fly to the tournament.
"We spent 21 hours in a van," Goertzen said. "They weren't allocating a lot of money to post-season play, not anticipating that that would happen. There was a lot of adversity, which actually makes you stronger."
While Bethel had intramural sports for women for years with teams that would occasionally play Tabor -- her grandmother and mother had played -- varsity sports for women was still a relatively new thing when Goertzen arrived.
"I didn't realize that until recently, the volleyball program I was a part of was only around a couple of years when I came around," she said. "When I was in high school, I didn't realize what I was apart of was just beginning. I didn't know I was supposed to be playing sports."
She said the biggest lesson learned at Bethel was discipline and teamwork.
"There has to be compromise and give and take," she said. "It takes all kinds of people different from yourself to reach goals. When you look at a team of volleyball players, there's a whole host of different personalities to mesh together to make it work. ... It can work, but it takes a lot of interaction. It was fun and it's rewarding."
She still follows the Bethel teams. She said the game has changed little since she graduated but the athletes have.
"When I played, people who played were coming to the college for the education and today there is a lot more recruiting going on," she said. "Today, it's more competitive trying to find the players that fit the type of team. They go outside the Mennonite circles, which is perfectly fine. In the early years, it was whoever happened to be the athletes going to the school.
"Today, there is a lot more weight training. We were never asked to lift weights. The style of play, it isn't completely the same, but they try to run the same quick offenses that we did."
She said she appreciates the recognition, but that it isn't something she can claim alone.
"I feel like a person does not get this award on your own," she said. "It takes teammates, coaches, parental support. In a team sport, you don't get to this point individually. (I have to) thank all those along the way. It was a team effort."
