Three teams who lifted Midwest Conference championship trophies joined the Monmouth College Champions Club on Saturday as part of the Homecoming festivities.

1981 & 1982 Volleyball

When half of your line-up is composed of future Hall of Famers—and the coach wound up inducted, too—the victories tend to pile up. That was the case with Monmouth College's volleyball teams in the early era of women's intercollegiate sports. In 1981, her first season as head coach, Kathy Wagoner led the Lady Scots to a 20–10 record that included a perfect 5–0 mark in conference play and a league title. Monmouth had even slightly more success the following season, going 22–10 to go with another perfect mark in league play and first-place finish. In the four decades that have followed, only three Monmouth volleyball squads have won more games in a single season, and Wagoner's .683 winning percentage over six years with the program is tops in school history. Leading the talented team she assembled was superb middle hitter Karen Friedrich, whose play featured intelligence and untiring  determination, in addition to elite athleticism. Friedrich was also a standout in softball, and two other multi-sport standouts who joined her in the M Club Hall of Fame—Mary Day and Kim Mead—were also part of the spiking squad, which was the last one to call the balconied Waid Gymnasium its home

1996 Men's Cross Country

Cross country has a long history at Monmouth College, dating back to just before the start of the Great Depression. The Fighting Scots harriers won Midwest Conference titles in their second and third years in 1930–31, but the program experienced a bit of a depression itself for over a half-century, either not fielding a squad or finishing well back of the pack most seasons. Despite his best efforts as an individual competitor for the Scots, Chris Pio '84 couldn't reverse that trend, but the program's fortunes changed when he became the head coach in 1988. Pio led Monmouth to runner-up league finishes five times in the next eight seasons, and then the 1996 squad broke through with a championship at the Midwest Conference meet, held in Waukesha, Wisconsin. All five runners placed in the top 10, led by Jamie Verstraete, who won the 8K race in 27:03. He was followed closely to the finish line by the trio of Frank Schweda, Matt Jenkins and Joel Eckberg, who claimed second through fourth place, all within 15 seconds of Verstraete. Jamie Nelson added a ninth-place finish as the Scots posted a tidy team score of 19 points, 40 points clear of runner-up Grinnell, which had captured the previous 10 league titles


Former champions from winter sports will enter the Champions Club at a ceremony in January and spring teams will follow in May.