Stewartville's all-timer Dzubay retires after 47 years of coaching

Jan. 21—STEWARTVILLE — When John Dzubay was initially asked to become a volleyball coach, the eventual Hall of Famer hadn't the foggiest notion about the sport's intricacies.

It was 1976, Dzubay was 27 years old and working as a high school band instructor and track and field coach in Plainview.

He'd just got done directing the Plainview girls to a state track-and-field championship. Some of those same athletes were on its fledgling volleyball team, which had just lost its coach. They liked Dzubay and figured coaching was coaching.

Well, it's not really. But they got two things right: Dzubay would say yes and he'd figure it out.

Did he ever.

Now, 47 years later, at the age of 75, that initial novice to bumping, setting and spiking has finally had enough. After spending five years coaching volleyball at Plainview, Dzubay immediately moved on to Stewartville where he became its band director and after five years as its B-squad volleyball coach, led its varsity until this past Friday morning. That's when Dzubay walked into the office of Tigers Activities Director Curt Hughes and informed him that it was finally time to look for a new volleyball coach.

After compiling more wins than any volleyball coach in state history — 1,039 — as well as five state championships, Dzubay has deemed it time to move on. His 47-year volleyball coaching career is done.

"The New Year came along and I decided that it was time to let someone else do this for a while," Dzubay said. "It wasn't just one thing that made me decide that. It was a lot of things."

Who that next person will be has yet to be determined. But the volleyball shoes they'll be attempting to fill might as well be size 50s. Dzubay has been that good and that driven for that long.

Never has there been another one like him. His all-time record — 1,039 wins, 220 losses — backs it up.

"Dzubay has been absolutely legendary," said Erin Lamb, who won a state championship under Dzubay in 2019 and has spent the last three years playing Division I volleyball at powerhouse University of Kentucky. "There is not a coach in Minnesota that had the success he had and the impact on a community and a program that he has. I found my love for volleyball from him. He taught me so many skills on the court. And more importantly, he taught so many lessons off the court. That's what makes him so special."

Among those skills was an appreciation for two things — the outdoors and each other.

For years, Dzubay took his volleyball teams on summer trips to the Boundary Waters, allowing his players to not only see some of the most picturesque scenery in the country, but experience life and each other in a new way.

"All of these little hikes he'd take us on in these trips, they turned out to be life lessons," Lamb said. "We'd go to the Boundary Waters and he'd always make sure we cleaned everything up as we left, that we'd leave things better than how we found them. It was always his attention to doing things the right way that stood out and doing it when no one else was watching."

No, that initial ask by those Plainview girls volleyball players was not too much. That's because it was directed at Dzubay, who lives for a challenge.

Learning the game of volleyball proved to be a perfect-sized project for him. He went right to work on it and never stopped. It mattered not at all to Dzubay that he'd never played it in any organized way.

It was simply time to get busy.

"The main thing I give credit to was a five-day volleyball coaching clinic that I went to at St. Catherine University (in St. Paul) that summer just before I got started," Dzubay said. "They had Olympic guys there teaching us. Volleyball was just getting started for girls in the state, so the clinic was loaded with guys like me who were trying to learn the sport."

It's safe to say that Dzubay — who was also immediately relentless with independent volleyball study, reading book after book about it, gleaning any information he could find and then putting his own practice plans into writing — learned it faster and better than most everybody else. Proof is what happened just one year later, when he already had Plainview playing in the state tournament.

"All of a sudden, to be there on that stage, it was pretty fun," Dzubay said. "That got me excited. And the fact that we weren't the tallest team but worked really hard, it made me think that (his plans) could work. It was that spark right away."

Dzubay would also direct the Stewartville volleyball team to a state tournament in just his second year as Tigers varsity coach. He'd later make that trip routine. From 1989 through 1998, Stewartville advanced to state every year.

There were five state titles mixed into his tenure, in 1991, 1997, 2000, 2014 and 2019. There likely would have been a sixth had COVID-19 not taken away the 2020 postseason. Stewartville, led by Lamb, had won it all in 2019 and most of that cast was back in 2020 when it had an unbeaten regular season.

Dzubay's tenure was also hit with momentary controversy. In 2015, he was suspended five matches for coaching rules violations.

But mostly, he has been on a coaching pedestal, placed there by his players and rival coaches alike.

Mabel-Canton volleyball coach Lonnie Morken, who is third on the all-time wins list among the state's volleyball coaches with 829 and also a Hall of Famer, has forever looked up to Dzubay as a coach and a man.

In all of his years as coach, Dzubay had just one losing season. That was this past year, when the Tigers finished 12-16.

Morken took in a couple of Stewartville's matches in 2023 and kept a special eye on Dzubay. Never did he walk away more impressed with him.

"John was as positive with those kids as I've ever seen him," Morken said. "With all the success he has had, it had to be hard to transition to a team that for them was below average. But I was blown away by how much teaching he was doing with those kids. The level of detail he was showing, even at the age of 75, was incredible."

Finally, after 47 years, Dzubay is done teaching. It's now time to enjoy his beloved disc golf with more frequency than ever. It's also time to head to his cabin in Tomahawk, Wis., and to do it when the fall colors are at their peak, something volleyball would never allow. And above all, it's time to spend more time than ever with his three grandkids.

Dzubay is primed for all of it.

"Volleyball is a lot of work that people don't realize," Dzubay said. "It is fun, but it is a constant thing in your head. You're always thinking, 'How can my team be as good as it can be next year?' I have five pages of lists of volleyball videos to watch. But now I don't have to do that. I am free from all of that. I can do what I want to do."

For 47 years, what he wanted to do was coach volleyball. As is true of most coaches, there was a primary motivation for that. It was the relationships.

"I kept coming back to be with the kids," Dzubay said. "Being with them, it is just really rejuvenating."