MSUB SPORTS – Iona Stookey is the current head volleyball coach at Huntley Project High School. Stookey has seen her teams win nine state championships with the first coming in 2003. Stookey graduated from Montana State University Billings in 1990 and played volleyball. Stookey is a breast cancer survivor, going on her fourth year of being cancer free. Stookey is married to her husband Mike and has three children; Tyler, Lindsey who was a part of Huntley's first two state championships, and Keera, who has been a part of Huntley's two most recent championships.
 
Kyle Hansen sat down with Stookey and caught up with an interview focused on her time as a student-athlete at MSU Billings. Current MSUB volleyball junior Stormy Siemion, who was a multi-state champion during her time at Huntley Project High under the tutelage of Stookey, was also interviewed to shed her perspective on her former coach.
 
KH: To get started, where are you now and what has been your path to getting here today?
 
IS: Well, I just finished my 25th year of teaching and coaching at Huntley Project. I teach health enhancement, K-12. Right now, for the last 10 years I've taught K-6, and then 9-10 P.E. We've won nine out of the last 12 state championships. I'm just about at 700 wins for my career. Should be able to hopefully pick that up this year. Love my job. Love coaching. I pretty much spend most of my year coaching or doing something with volleyball. Summers are very involved with my kids, and I just got back from Florida. We go to the AAU National Volleyball Tournament every summer. We take a team to the Greeley tournament in Colorado in July for a big team camp. I'm married with three kids. We live in Huntley, but haven't left.
 
KH: What drew you to volleyball instead of any other sport?
 
IS: In high school, we didn't have volleyball my sophomore year. Freshmen were still in junior high at that time. I was very sports oriented. I played basketball and ran track. Volleyball started my junior year. I think it was the coach I had. Patty Patrick, really she was a great first year coach for me and it just gave me the love of the game. And then my senior year, Kathy James was the assistant coach at West and also the head coach here (MSUB) and she's the one that recruited me. I liked the competitiveness of the game. I liked the team aspect. Everybody had to play together to make the game work. I just liked competing. I think volleyball is a great game for women. Men too, but obviously in Montana the women play it. It's intense and I love playing it and I still play.
 
KH: In college, what drew you to getting an education degree?
 
IS: To be honest with you, when I was deciding where I wanted to go to school, it was either here or Greeley, University of Northern Colorado for a journalism degree. When I decided to stay here, my family could watch and all that, and I knew they didn't have journalism here and so I just wanted to be a coach and a teacher then so I knew this was the right place for me. So it was just a matter of the volleyball part and having the educational opportunity, and to be a teacher. When I first decided to come here I wasn't sure that's what I wanted to be but it didn't take me very long to figure out that that's what I wanted to do. And I love it.
 
KH: So you knew early on that you wanted to coach?
 
IS: Those first two years of high school, I just had two great coaches. I just thought I wanted to be like them. It was something that they brought to girls and made you feel so important and that's just how I wanted to be.
 
KH: Like you said, Huntley has won nine of the last 12 Class B state championships. You were there for the first one in 2003. How have you been able to get your players to buy in to hard work and win a state championship?
 
IS: I think the most important thing is communication. Opportunities. I give kids opportunities all of the time. In my mind you never cancel an open gym, because once you cancel it one time they will always question whether you're going to have it again. Like I said, opportunities. Always getting information out there for different camps. And just making it fun. I teach kindergarten volleyball skills, just the girls and the boys. I just love kids, I love coaching volleyball and I couldn't imagine not doing it.
 
SS: As the years went on and we started to win, there was more pressure and we took things a lot more seriously. Our practices were hard, and that was the best shape I had ever been in my whole life. We took it seriously. It was always business, but we also did have a lot of fun. It was definitely the most fun volleyball I had ever played. It was great to play underneath her. She taught me everything I knew before I got to college and helped get me to where I am now.
 
KH: Could you describe the feeling of your first state championship?
 
IS: It was very emotional. It was very exciting to finally get to that point. We finished third, third, second, and then finally got the first. It was kind of a relief feeling too but yet a very proud feeling to know that I finally figured out what I needed to do right to finally win it. I was getting close but I had to keep working on some stuff. I think in my mind our teams are very talented defensively. That's one thing Huntley Project is known for is our great floor defense. I decided that I wanted to get better in that area. I've been coaching there for 25 years and this is kind of a funny thing but I've never had a six-footer. My average height of my kids is probably 5'7" or 5'8". I've won several state championships with 5'7" or shorter. Back then I thought, 'Okay, what do I need to do different to try and beat these taller teams.' I have a practice that I call Terrific Tuesday practices. My kids call it Terrible Tuesdays and I haven't figured out why but I kind of laugh about it. On Tuesdays I'll find them in the hallway, high-five them, 'It's Tuesday!' and get them ready and basically we spend two hours just doing defensive drills. I really think that's helped a lot. What I can't make up with the attack I try to make up on defense. Obviously it doesn't work all the time but I feel that that's been a lot of the success. The kids know that when they walk into the gym on Tuesdays they're going to work hard for two hours and be done. I always tell them if I'm not done by 6 o'clock you guys can walk out. For my success, you have to work hard and I really try to lead by example.
 
KH: It's commonly described that the hardest thing to do in sports is win back-to-back championships. Your nine titles at Huntley have gone back-to-back, back-to-back, five in a row. How have you been able to sell to your players, 'Yes we won last year, but we have to do it again'?
 
IS: We never talk about what we did last year. I'm so superstitious. The one thing I don't talk about is what happened in the past because there's enough pressure on those kids. We know what our ultimate goal is, but we never talk about it. I don't want to put that kind of pressure on those kids. They have enough coming to practice, going to school, and whatever they're doing with their home life. I just keep working hard and know that there's always somebody out there that's going to beat us or wants to beat us and just try to stay focused on that aspect. What I go with is tradition. Tradition, for me, is to go with what got me there and that means keep working hard on defense. I do the same practice plan that I was doing 10 years ago. Just continuous tradition. Since I've been there I've had a lot of younger siblings that have watched their older sisters be successful and they want to be just like them.

 

SS: If we were to worry about winning a title the year before, that would be setting us up to lose. We always looked forward knowing that any team we played had the chance to beat us. That helped us along way. We didn't win every single game, but when it came down to crunch time we came through. We didn't underestimate any team we played.
 
KH: Do you see yourself finishing your coaching career at Huntley?
 
IS: Yeah. I have no desire to coach at the college level. I love my job. I love coaching at Huntley, I love teaching there. I love the community. It's a great place to live, a great place to raise your kids. We had that fire in 2008 that burned the school down which was a bad deal. But, out of it, we got a beautiful facility, top of the line technology and an awesome gym. My classroom is beautiful to walk into every day. For me the community has been great. For me, I love it and I couldn't imagine being anywhere else.
 
KH: Stormy, talk about the impact Iona had on your decision to attend MSUB.
 
SS: One of the main things for me in coming to MSUB was my scholarship, and also it was nice to be close to my family and watch my sister player her last years in high school. It has been great to have Iona here too, and I have talked to her about lots of things in terms of the college game. I turned to her and it has really helped me having her around.
 
KH: Four years ago a Billings Gazette feature article was written about your battle with breast cancer. Could you talk about where you are in that stage of your life?
 
IS: I have been cancer free now for four years. That was a tough time, going through the chemotherapy and the radiation and coaching and trying to put it all together and still win a state championship. It was something that I wouldn't wish on anybody but it really opened my eyes to how much cancer is out there that I didn't even realize. The other thing it opened my eyes to is how important benefits are. When somebody is doing a benefit for somebody that has cancer or, not even necessarily cancer, but something. I just realized that it took me to be to that point to realize how important those kind of things are. My line is: 'every day is a gift.' It truly is. I think that's why I just want to be the best person I can be to everybody I'm around. I really, truly have tried to stay so positive. Life is good right now. I feel great. I haven't had any problems for four years.
 
KH: What was your driving force to persevere through your diagnosis?
 
IS: My family. My job. The girls. My team. The community. Everybody was really behind me. I hate to lose. I am the worst loser. I lost a semifinal game in 2002, 19-17 in the fifth against Roundup. It was a great match and they ended up going on and winning state. That's just one that comes to mind. But I hate to lose. Everything I do, I do with the idea that I'm going to step in and win it. I didn't know how it would be to just to lay there and give up because I'm just not like that. My driving force was I just hate to lose. I take every loss right to heart. It wasn't even in my vocabulary that I wasn't going to beat this.
 
SS: When I was a junior is when all of this happened. Seeing her fight that battle helped us push through, but it was hard when she wasn't fully there because she was dealing with things. But that made us want to work even harder, push through, and get a win for her again. It was nice to be able to pull through for her and to get a state championship the year after that too. I feel like a lot of girls looked up to her even before she was diagnosed with cancer, and afterwards that number increased. I have looked up to her and she is almost like a mother figure to me. I still talk to her. She inspires me to keep on working hard, and her love for volleyball definitely crossed over to me and how much I love it. She inspired me to keep on pushing hard and to not give up.
 
KH: You said your motto is: 'every day is a gift.' Has being a cancer survivor changed the way you live?
 
IS: Yeah it really has. I don't sweat the little things anymore. I'm still not over that loss in 2002, but I get it. There are a lot worse things out there than losing a volleyball game. I don't like negative people. I have a hard time with negative people in my life. I think I have changed because when you think you have it bad, there's somebody out there that has it worse. That's what I always try to tell myself. I have no room for negativity and no room for quitters in my life because if I'd have quit I wouldn't be here. The kids that play for me, they know that, and they want to play for me. They want to play for me because they know that I won't quit on them. I didn't quit on myself, I'm not going to quit on them. They're not going to quit on me. And it's fun. I like being able to see kids succeed. I just like staying positive. Like I said, every day is a gift, you never know what tomorrow will bring and so enjoy today. That's where I'm at with it, and it's sad but true, but it did take something like cancer to make me think that way. It wasn't that I was negative before but, like I said, losing bothered me. Now I'm a little bit of a more gracious loser as far as, you know what, I get to wake up tomorrow.