David Jablonski: Wittenberg men’s volleyball: Dayton, West Liberty-Salem grad leads program to Final Four

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Jamie Peterson, the head coach of the Wittenberg University men’s volleyball team, won’t travel with her players from Springfield, Ohio, to Springfield, Mass., this week for the NCAA Division III Final Four, but she will still be there. She wouldn’t miss the opportunity to coach the team in the most important match in program history.

Peterson is eight months pregnant, so she can’t fly. She’ll travel by car 11 hours with her dad James for the match on Thursday, April 23, at Springfield College. Then her husband Zach Sprinkle, who will fly to Massachusetts on Wednesday, will drive her home whenever the season ends.

For Peterson, long car rides are a small price to pay for an unexpected tournament run by an unranked team that had never played in the NCAA tournament before this season.

“There’s a little bit of a shock in terms of how we performed this weekend with it being our first NCAA tournament,” Peterson told the Springfield News-Sun on Sunday, April 19, “but in terms of our talent level and just showing people that we can play with some of the best teams in the country, I’m not shocked at all. I think this is something that they’ve been proving to me since August.”

Wittenberg (24-5) will play No. 3 Carthage College (24-3), which won national championships in 2021 and 2022, in the national semifinals at 7:30 p.m. Thursday at Springfield College. The championship match will take place at 7 p.m. Saturday.

Wittenberg takes a 14-match winning streak into the Final Four.

“We’re playing with house money,” Peterson said. “Nobody thinks that we have any business being in a Final Four. There’s no pressure. We can play free and aggressively, and at the end of the day, we’re going to leave the game not having any regrets based on our effort and how we stuck together and had each other’s back through it all.”

No. 1 Springfield (23-3) will play No. 5 Cal Lutheran University in the other semifinal at 5 p.m. Thursday, April 23.

Springfield has won five national championships since 2012, the first year there was a NCAA tournament in D-III men’s volleyball. Cal Lutheran won the championship in 2024.

Joining three national championship programs in the Final Four makes Wittenberg an even bigger underdog than it was last week when it won three matches against top-25 teams in three days in Huntingdon, Pa. The Tigers beat No. 13 Wentworth Institute of Technology 3-1, No. 2 Juniata College 3-2 and No. 8 Messiah University in straight sets.

“They know how good they can be,” Peterson said, “and we fought through some moments where maybe we were not as good as we could have been. Physically, we know we’re gifted. We knew we had to work on our mentality and staying composed in really big moments. That’s the biggest piece. We gained so much confidence over the last weekend to make us pretty dangerous going into next weekend.”

Peterson, a West Liberty-Salem High School graduate, was named the NCAA Division III Coach of the Year by the American Volleyball Coaches Association on Tuesday, April 21. She’s 30-8 since taking over as interim coach during the 2025 season.