Marquis resigns volleyball position at CSC

CHADRON – Natasha Marquis has resigned her position as Chadron State College's head volleyball coach, athletic director Brad Smith said on Monday.

Marquis, who went 5-25 during her only season at Chadron State, will be an assistant coach at Southern Illinois, a Division I school in Carbondale.

A search for her replacement will begin immediately, Smith said.

The Eagles improved under Marquis, a native of King City, Calif., last season. In addition to earning the most wins since 2007, CSC improved in nearly every statistical category, including attack percentage, kills per set, digs per set, blocks per set, assists per set and points per set.

"I appreciated working and coaching at Chadron State and the support from the campus and community was tremendous," Marquis said. "It is hard to leave but I have high hopes for the volleyball team and I will always keep an eye on them."

Chadron State's volleyball team also recently earned an American Volleyball Coaches Association Team Academic Award. The Eagles were one of three Rocky Mountain Athletic Conference schools to be honored.

Prior to becoming the 13th head volleyball coach at Chadron State, Marquis, 26, was a graduate assistant at the University of Nebraska-Kearney.

She joined the UNK staff in the summer of 2008 and helped guide the Lopers to three consecutive Rocky Mountain Athletic Conference championships.

Marquis will coach under Justin Ingram at Southern Illinois. Ingram was hired in January and spent the previous three years as the head coach at Arkansas State and was the 2011 Sun Belt Coach of the Year.

It was also announced Monday that the Eagles' volleyball team received a team academic award from the American Volleyball Coaches Association.

The Eagles were one of three Rocky Mountain Athletic Conference squads honored by the AVCA. The other two RMAC schools are Adams State and Colorado Mesa.

In all, 533 teams earned the AVCA Team Academic Award for the 2011-2012 season. This number once again breaks the previous year's total of 481 and sets a new all-time high for this award.

The award, which was initiated in the 1992-93 academic year, honors collegiate and high school volleyball teams that displayed excellence in the classroom during the school year by maintaining at least a 3.30 cumulative team grade-point average on a 4.0 scale.

The Team Academic Award has become one of the AVCA's fastest growing awards programs, seeing an impressive surge in teams honored over the past several years.

Over 1,000 different schools have earned the award in the program's 20-year history, with exactly 4,827 awards been given out in total.

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