Illinois College announced today that Alicia Wood will be the school’s new head volleyball coach. Wood has spent the last two seasons as an assistant coach at DePauw University, helping guide the Tigers to the NCAA Tournament in each of the past two seasons, including a first-round victory in 2018.
Wood played volleyball at Bluffton University before playing for and graduating from Ursuline College in 2015. Her coaching career began before she graduated from college, serving as a USA Junior Volleyball head coach for The Academy for Volleyball in Cleveland.
Her first college coaching role started in 2015 as an assistant coach at Cuyahoga Community College, where she helped the program to its best overall record in school history in 2016 and coached six all-conference selections over three seasons.
For the past two seasons, Wood has served as an assistant at DePauw. The Tigers made two NCAA Tournament appearances and won the 2019 North Coast Athletic Conference (NCAC) Tournament to garner an automatic bid. She also trained two NCAC Players of the Year and a pair of American Volleyball Coaches Association (AVCA) Third Team All-Americans. DePauw earned the AVCA Team Academic Award in each of her two seasons with the program and one individual was honored as an Academic All-American.
Wood replaces Kristy Duncan who resigned her position at IC for the head coach position at Loras College. Duncan was the head coach of women’s volleyball for six seasons at Illinois College, compiling a record of 92-77 with trips to the Midwest Conference Tournament in 2018 and 2019.
A partial list of the upcoming season schedule for the Lady Blues can be found here. The first game is scheduled at home is a scrimmage with Lincoln Christian University on Tuesday, August 25th. The complete schedule is expected to be available after tournament matchups are finalized in the next few weeks.