Tom Mendoza looked down and realized what he’d done.
“Oh my goodness, I am not paying attention,” he said, staring at the chessboard he keeps in his office. “That was a big mistake.”
It’s only been a few moves, and the mid-interview game of chess he’s playing against me is far from over, but he’s already let me trap his valuable dark-square bishop with one of my pawns. I’m suffocating him, in the game, of course.
Now, his bishop’s death unstoppable, he’s left with a choice. Most people in his situation would cut their losses, trading their bishop for the attacking pawn to cede only two points instead of three. It would allow him to gain something, anything, from a losing position.
Mendoza isn’t most people.
“Losing pretty is still losing,” he says.
He leans back in his chair, rubs the hairs on his beard and rapidly scans the entire board.
After some quiet muttering on how to get out of his predicament, he settles on a plan of action. He starts swinging, a trapped piece be damned. Mendoza marches a different pawn forward, letting the bishop die for nothing. Not exactly a sacrifice, but not far from it, either.
“If you’re in a bad situation, just counterattack,” he says with the piece in his hand. “Stay aggressive.”
He knows he is giving up more than he needs to, but that’s okay. He has another idea: gain momentum.
Truth is, Mendoza’s thought this way before.
His mentality is a big reason why he’s here, in the Marquette volleyball head coach’s office on the second floor of the Al McGuire Center on a mid-August morning, sitting at his desk in front of his prominent chessboard which his wife Megan gave him before his flight to Milwaukee.
He’s been pushing pawns his whole life.
Perhaps the first one Mendoza shoved forward, much like the August one, was an actual pawn.
Decades before volleyball took him on a lifelong journey around the country — from Newman University to Lewis University as a player; before Michigan State, followed by Evansville and Creighton as an assistant; before, as a head coach, bouncing from High Point to South Carolina to where he is now at Marquette, having just been hired five months ago — Mendoza was a kid from Illinois learning chess.
Taught the game when he was little, he understood at a young age how to play. It was one piece of the puzzle that was Mendoza’s childhood; the rest filled in by a rotation of various sports, none of which included volleyball. At least not until he started going to his sister’s practices while in junior high, when he began to fall in love with the sport. He played his first match in eighth grade and didn’t look back.
“I was lucky enough to be in an area where there was high school and club volleyball,” said Mendoza, who lived in the Chicago area and attended Buffalo Grove High School.
Volleyball clicked in his brain immediately; enough for him to take his talents as a setter to the collegiate level after only four years of in-game experience. He started at Newman University, where he kept the ball rolling — and floating. Every year ended on the all-conference team. Many weeks came with some kind of honor. One season, he was named an NAIA All-American.
Then, for his swan song, Mendoza moved up to Division I at Lewis in Romeoville, Illinois, re-integrating himself into the volleyball-rich Chicago area. The decision allowed him to connect with people who played an integral role in his life then, and still do now, decades later.
One of those people, funny enough, is his current associate head coach and longtime friend/colleague, Ethan Pheister, who is about to begin his eighth season with Mendoza. Pheister, still in high school, was on a visit to Lewis, where Mendoza had just finished playing and assumed a graduate assistant-type role. They didn’t spend much time together, but it was enough for them to remember each other; the first domino in a long line that has taken the pair from Columbia to Milwaukee.
Someone who had a much more immediate impact was the person who gave Mendoza his first taste of coaching: Dave Bayer, the current director of the volleyball club Milwaukee Sting.
At the time, Bayer was the club director of Sports Performance Volleyball in Aurora, Illinois. He was looking for a head coach for the under-15 boys team, and asked Mendoza, still playing at Lewis, if he was interested. Mendoza, who was looking to give back to the volleyball world, didn’t hesitate to take him up on the offer.
“Once he was in the gym,” Bayer said, “he really found a love for working, coaching.”
Mendoza did the job for a couple seasons, thinking that would be the end of it. He was planning on entering the business world with his management information systems degree. Maybe, if he were lucky, he could coach volleyball on the side. But it wouldn’t be his life.
Mike Gawlik had other plans. Gawlik, who went to Naperville North High School and was arch-rivals with Mendoza in club play, came calling with an offer for Mendoza to help out at Michigan State, where he was an assistant coach.
Back in those days, the mid-aughts, pretty much every big program ran off volunteer assistants. That was Gawlik’s offer. An unpaid internship, essentially. But, a way to get his foot in the door. Give this a real shot. It meant uprooting his life and moving hundreds of miles away to a new state to work long hours and late nights — all for zero pay.
Mendoza said yes. He took a chance on himself, his career. Got aggressive.
Sound familiar?
Mendoza’s move from Romeoville to East Lansing came with similar strings attached to the pawn push in that mid-August game.
In chess, pawns cannot go backwards. Once you move them forward, they can only keep marching. Sometimes, especially in the early days, as Mendoza is at this time, coaching can feel the same way. Like there’s only one direction. A step back is often not an option, at least not to be successful.
That was never an issue for him, the man whom Bayer quickly could tell had “coaching DNA.”
When he showed up on campus — as a volunteer, remember — his fresh-from-playing volleyball mind was immediately utilized by head coach Cathy George, who began picking his brain in practices and film sessions. Over time, along with the on-court drill-running and ball-hitting, George started having Mendoza hang around the office longer, giving him more responsibilities.
“Probably worked him harder than we should as a volunteer,” George said, chuckling.
Mendoza did — and learned — probably more than your average volunteer; stuff like what it takes to run a program one day. That was on purpose.
“I wanted it to be an investment in the future for him,” George said. “And then he would have confidence in the next role that he would have.”
George likes to say volleyball is the easy part. Mendoza had that down pat. Where the growing pains existed was in the politics of coaching. The art of juggling your players and their expectations, your bosses and theirs, your program donors and theirs. But, in a similar vein to the speed at which he learned the sport, Mendoza quickly figured out how to get the best from his squads.
One of the earliest examples came in his first year in East Lansing, 2007, which the senior-laden Spartans ended in the Sweet 16. An exception to that bevy of experience was first-year setter Lauren O’Reilly. The season-opener that year, Michigan State was at Southern California. It was O’Reilly’s first career match, and Mendoza, who worked closely with her, could tell. The Spartans were swept out of the gym and Los Angeles. Given two options — either panic or get to work — the pair chose the latter.
“She just got better and better as the year went on,” Mendoza said.
That ability to maximize his players stuck with him his whole career.
Fourteen years later, now at South Carolina, his second school as a head coach, one of Mendoza’s starters got injured halfway through the season. Part of his remaining roster consisted of a right side that could play six full rotations, and a libero that couldn’t. At the time, Mendoza employed a system that meant an increased workload for the libero, while a right side occupied a less prominent role.
Understanding his team’s strengths, he creatively diverted from the conventional approach, giving the better-equipped right side more playing time. Unorthodox, yes, but effective. It took a few weeks for the Gamecocks to find their footing, but they ended the year in the NCAA tournament.
“He has a great knack for empowering people to trust themselves,” Pheister said.
One time, in his final year in Columbia, that required preaching the motto that’s gotten him through life.
It was late November 2024, days before Thanksgiving. South Carolina was in Knoxville, the second time it had faced Tennessee. Mendoza was watching his team come up a day late and a dollar short. They dropped the first set 25-20, the second 25-19 and the third 25-20 again. A 3-0 sweep for the Volunteers. In the post-game box score rundown, one thing stuck out like a sore thumb: the serving.
A goose egg number of aces — the first time all season that had happened — and seven errors. Not exactly a winning recipe. But Mendoza was angrier about how they served, not what the stat sheet showed.
“We served super passive and got rolled,” he said.
It was made even worse by the fact he had swept Tennessee the first time they played, three weeks prior. Mendoza knew his team was better than that.
Next on the schedule was longtime powerhouse No. 18 Florida. Just like they had against Tennessee, the Gamecocks had swept the Gators the first time they played — and that win came in Gainesville, a place in which they had only taken two sets since joining the SEC in 1991. So, with the sour aftertaste of timid serving fresh on his breath, Mendoza spent the three practice days before the Gators came to town hammering into his players being aggressive from behind the line.
“We thought if we serve the same way, passively, that we had done against Tennessee,” he said, “that Florida would beat us up pretty good.”
South Carolina ended the match with 30 errors to five aces. They won, 3-2.
“Might as well be aggressive,” he said. “Might as well go for it.”
Go for it, they did. Be aggressive, they did. Leave victorious, they did.
This thinking is why one of his U-15 Sports Performance team finished fifth place at the Junior Olympic Nationals. Why, like he did with Michigan State, he helped get Creighton to a Sweet 16, which went along with five conference championships.
Why, in his first season as a head coach at High Point, the Panthers won the second-most games in the program’s Division I era (24) and earned their third-ever NCAA tournament berth, the first at-large bid in Big South Conference history.
Why it took him only two years to pop up on high major head coaching radars, and why he immediately snapped South Carolina’s 16-year NCAA tournament drought before leaving the Gamecocks seven years later as the fastest coach in program history to reach 50 wins. Why, in his nine total seasons as a head coach, six have ended in the Big Dance.
Why Marquette — an NCAA tournament mainstay needing to remain nationally relevant — reached out to him with the responsibility of carrying the torch after its greatest coach left, an opportunity he jumped at, ready to escape Footballdom, officially known as the SEC, and get back to Volleyballville (or something closer to it).
Why Mendoza’s upward career trajectory can be likened to his pawn’s upward move: aggressive.
Mendoza’s push/sacrifice in our mid-interview match paid off.
He now has the upper hand, both materially and mentally. Momentum is on his side. He’s suffocating me, not the other way around. The muttering has largely quieted. He’s still rubbing his beard, commenting on moves when they happen, but there’s a different demeanor.
Mendoza’s cashed in after going all in.
Another day in the life for the guy who turned a two-year volunteer opportunity into a career. Who rose the ranks so fast he became a college player with only four years experience and a head coach in his 30s. Who has always ended his first year at a new school in the NCAA tournament. Who hopes to continue his decades-long pattern of success, now at a program also with a decade-long pattern of success, that hired and challenged him — or burdened, it could be said — with building off a historic 2024 season with only a few months to prepare.
“Can the program keep getting better? And I think the answer is yes,” Mendoza said. “Now that’s going to take a lot of work, but I think we can. I think we can keep growing it, and it’ll be a pretty cool experience to do that.”
Back in the game, Mendoza kept his foot on my neck, stopping my forward progress while simultaneously continuing his. He dictated my moves, forced me to play his way. I was a ragdoll. With checkmate inevitable, I called a quits and resigned.
He won, just like he always has: aggressively.
This article was written by Jack Albright. He can be reached at jack.albright@marquette.edu or on Twitter/X @JackAlbrightMU.