Head to Victor E. Court for a Tuesday morning NIU volleyball practice.
Pay close enough attention between reps, and one might be able to witness the jocular antics perpetrated by graduate student outside hitter Katie Erdmann.
One day, Erdmann might simply be testing out a British accent. On others, she could send sophomore defensive specialist/libero Olivia Hogan to the hardwood with an “ankle-breaker,” bring junior libero Crew Hoffmeier to the ground with a playful chokehold maneuver, or take part in what will only be described as the “Rocky Lombardi.”
Rest assured, it’s all in good fun. It’s the type of fun Erdmann has learned to manifest through her four seasons and change playing college volleyball.
“I think that you can absolutely be a great volleyball player while taking the stress out of it, and I think that that’s what really helps me is just goofing around,” Erdmann said.
University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee sophomore defensive specialist Kara Erdmann, Katie Erdmann’s younger sister, has seen firsthand the type of player her sister can be when she embraces her exuberance.
“She’s just having fun,” Kara Erdmann said. “She loves the game, and so when she has other people surrounding her who also love the game, it’s just a completely different side of her.”
The fun-loving side of the elder Erdmann is just one of many facets to the well-rounded player.
Since arriving at NIU in the offseason as a fifth-year transfer, Erdmann has earned the affectionate title of “grandma.” It’s a distinction earned not just for her seniority over the rest of the roster – having turned 22 years old on Feb. 23 – but also for her nurturing and caring nature akin to that of the archetypal grandmother.
“Whenever people need to talk to me, whenever people need to hang out, they do,” Erdmann said. “If it’s somebody’s birthday, I’m baking them a cake … and I’ve really stepped into that role of, just, I want people to feel good in my presence, and I’m pretty sure I’m achieving that.”
“Grandma” Erdmann was one of six transfer portal additions made by first-year NIU volleyball head coach Sondra Parys. Upon her arrival in DeKalb, Erdmann immediately became one of NIU’s most seasoned players with 76 matches of experience, trailing only senior setter Ella Mihacevich by two games.
NIU is the third and final stop of Erdmann’s college career. Erdmann is playing out her final season just an hour away from her hometown of Forreston after spending the past four years competing in the Deep South.
STARTING DOWN SOUTH
Erdmann’s college career got its start in the fall of 2019 at the University of Southern Mississippi. She appeared in 31 sets and logged 42 kills during her freshman season in 2019.
In the offseason of her sophomore campaign, Southern Miss became one of the countless college athletics programs impacted by the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. The Golden Eagles’ 2020 season was pushed into the spring of the following year as a result.
The ramifications of the pandemic, combined with outside influences on her life, left Erdmann at a career crossroads.
“I hit a couple roadblocks in my external life, and then it kind of bled into my volleyball life, and I, just, was not loving the game anymore,” Erdmann said. “I didn’t have the same drive that I used to.”
After a tough conversation with Southern Miss’ coaching staff, Erdmann entered the transfer portal to seek out new opportunities. Specifically, an opportunity that would reignite her passion for the sport.
Erdmann found exactly that when she received an offer to play volleyball for one one of Florida’s most prestigious institutions in one of the top-ranked conferences at the Division II level.
NEW SCENE IN YEAR 3
Erdmann transferred to the Florida Institute of Technology – a private research university in Melbourne, Florida – just weeks before the 2021 regular season. She was one of five newcomers brought in by Panthers first-year head coach Ashlee Crowder.
“It was almost back to being a big fish in a small pond again, where I found my confidence, and I fell in love with the game again,” Erdmann said.
Erdmann played her best two seasons of volleyball to date during her time on Florida’s Atlantic Coast. In her first season as a Panther, Erdmann racked up 350 kills – the most in her career up to that point – and led the team in scoring with 383 points.
One season later, Erdmann engineered one of the best offensive seasons in school history.
Erdmann set Florida Tech’s single-season record for attack attempts (1,315) and logged the fourth-most kills by a Panther (459). She also led the team in kills per set (4.21), points (498.5) and points per set (4.57) en route to an All-Sunshine State Conference Second Team selection.
All the while, Erdmann had mapped out the remainder of her college career.
“I was fast-tracked on the MBA program, I had already been admitted into the grad school, so I was starting my MBA while I was in undergrad,” Erdmann said. “I had everything figured out because that COVID year gave me that year to finish my master’s. It was going to be good.”
Then came the bombshell that derailed those plans.
During the first week of January, Crowder gathered the team on a Zoom call to deliver the news that she was leaving the program. She had accepted the head coaching gig at SSC rival Florida Southern College.
“It was a shock,” Erdmann said. “It was a little bit of a hard pill to swallow, and because I had set myself up statistically in the way that I had, I took that and ran with it. I wasn’t going to let another coach come in and determine my last year of volleyball for me. I was going to go make that decision myself.”
CLUB CONNECTIONS
Erdmann’s decision resulted in her second go-round in the transfer portal. The recruiting process remained the same as it was from her high school days and her first stint in the portal. Only this time, she had her sights set on a return to where it all started.
“I knew that if I was going to uproot across the country again, it was going to be a lot easier if I came home,” Erdmann said.
With that criteria in mind, Erdmann reached out to her former club coach, Eric Schulze, to gauge her options.
Schulze is the executive director at Rockford-based junior volleyball club VC United. He has coached Erdmann, teammates sophomore middle blocker Savanah Brandt, sophomore defensive specialist/libero Grace Betke, and even Parys herself.
Around that same time, Schulze had also been in talks with Parys, who was searching for players to build her newly-inherited roster with.
“It was probably within the first four weeks that Sondra had taken the job that we started to have those types of conversations about any potential players that were tied with VC United that maybe were looking to come back home for one reason or another,” Schulze said.
Soon enough, Schulze was able to play matchmaker and connect his two former players with one another.
“It was a good first phone call that led to another one, and then it was kind of an easy decision for both of us that this was the place for her,” Parys said.
Parys made Erdmann’s long-awaited homecoming official on June 28 when Parys announced her as one of two additions to NIU’s roster in a NIU Athletics press release.
THE FAREWELL TOUR
Erdmann has started 19 of the 23 matches she’s played while donning NIU’s colors. Her 167 kills rank third on the team.
Erdmann registered one of her best performances of the season during NIU’s series split with Bowling Green State University. She took home a pair of double-doubles with 32 kills and 24 digs against the defending MAC champions.
“I think we started to see a lot of the training come together, a lot of her confidence come together and that fearless mentality came out,” Parys said. “How she performed – something that I say as a coach – is best-case scenario.”
In the matches since, Erdmann has continued to establish herself as one of NIU’s top offensive threats. She paces the Huskies with 107 kills in conference play. Erdmann has also established prowess as a passer.
“Anytime someone is serving her, there’s a good chance it’s going to be a really good pass,” Parys said. “A huge part of our team’s success is her ability to pass the ball and put us in system off of a service ace.”
Erdmann’s first kill in NIU’s Oct. 17 matchup with MAC leader Western Michigan University pushed her to 1,000 career kills, making her the 24th Huskie to achieve the statistical milestone.
The volleyball veteran is slated to make her 100th career game appearance Friday when NIU hosts the University of Akron Zips at Victor E. Court in a battle for the MAC’s No. 6 seed.
At least seven matches remain in Erdmann’s playing career. Though Erdmann’s stint at NIU will ultimately be a short one, Parys believes Erdmann can make an everlasting mark on a rebuilding program.
“There’s so much opportunity for a legacy to be left with the culture that we’re really trying to build in Year 1,” Parys said. “That’s something we are really still focusing on. Obviously, the success and the outcome of wins and losses is important, but also it’s going to be the foundation of the type of culture and type of leaders that we are building here to be able to continue to build this program.”
When asked if her tenure as a Huskie has lived up to expectations, Erdmann’s response left a window of uncertainty before immediately shutting it.
“I don’t know if I could’ve imagined it, but I also wouldn’t have it any other way because it’s been a spectacular experience for me thus far,” Erdmann said.
END OF THE LINE
Erdmann’s NCAA eligibility will be exhausted come the end of the Huskies’ 2023 campaign. With five years and three schools worth of college experience to look back on, Erdmann believes she’s grown from each stop of her journey.
“I think everyone goes through and hits adversity in college, but I have been so many places, I’ve experienced so many different things, I’ve met so many different types of people,” Erdmann said. “I think that I’ve taken little bits and pieces of each school and each person with me, and ultimately, when I reflect on this, I’m going to be proud of the growth that I’ve made from when I graduated high school in 2019.”
Eric Erdmann, Katie Erdmann’s father, asserts that his daughter’s extensive career is a testament of her ability to turn uncertainty into opportunity.
“She’s always taking these changes and initially, you’re thinking ‘what am I going to do?’ But she’s always turned them into opportunities,” Eric Erdmann said.
The Erdmann family patriarch has optimism for the player that started out with small-town success and has since experienced enough walks of life to prepare her for the next chapter.
“She’s a great kid,” Eric Erdmann said of his daughter. “She’s a small-town girl, she’s lived. I mean, can you imagine being her age and spent two years in Mississippi, then spent two years on the coast of Florida? She’s lived. It’s kind of cool, and I clearly think she’s going to be just fine in this crazy world we live in.”
