Adam: Schwagmeyer-Belger’s hiring similar to another QU hire of local standout 15 years ago

QUINCY — The first time Josh Rabe spoke with Ali Schwagmeyer-Belger about the women’s basketball coaching position at Quincy University, he immediately dismissed her lack of college experience.

“I was like, ‘What would you do?’” Rabe asked her if she got the job.  “She walked through some key hallmarks of program building, and I’m like, ‘OK, now we’re on the same page.’ Kind of organically, the conversation grew from there. The next thing you know, it’s an hour and 15 minutes later. I thought, ‘I need to pump the brakes here.’ 

“Yeah, (the conversation) was great.”

What made it great? 

Rabe saw a lot of himself in Schwagmeyer-Belger, who was introduced as Courtney Boyd’s replacement as the women’s basketball coach during a Tuesday afternoon press gathering in the Hall of Fame room outside of Pepsi Arena.

When he was hired in 2010 as the baseball coach at QU, Rabe’s entire college coaching experience was two years as the recruiting coordinator and hitting coach at now-defunct St. Joseph’s College in Rensselaer, Ind. He had spent nine seasons playing professional baseball in the minor leagues. Before playing three seasons on the QU baseball team, Rabe was a multi-sport athlete at Unity High School and grew up outside Mendon, a village in Adams County with a population of around 875 people.

Schwagmeyer-Belger’s college coaching experience consisted of one year as the head coach at John Wood Community College, where an injury-ravaged team posted a 10-20 record, and time as an assistant at Hannibal-LaGrange University. Her professional playing career took her to Germany, Spain, Romania, Australia and Serbia. Before she spent two seasons at Charleston Southern and two at QU as a player, she was a multi-sport athlete at Central High School and grew up in Camp Point, a village in Adams County with a population of around 1,125 people.

“That’s why I had to pump the brakes a little bit,” Rabe said with a big smile.

“I don’t like comparing (himself to Schwagmeyer-Belger) that way, but yes, I saw the similarity. This is somebody who you know is not going to have her resume plucked out of a stack of 100 just because of (her lack of college coaching experience). But once you get below that surface, you’re like, there’s a lot of hallmarks in here that are indicators of success.”

Rabe’s success as a baseball coach is well-documented. His teams won 348 games and qualified for seven NCAA Division II tournaments in 11 seasons.

He won’t expect or predict Schwagmeyer-Belger to have success like his, but he believes her adjustment to the competition level in Division II and the Great Lakes Valley Conference will be swift. She and her husband, former Quincy University basketball standout Courtney Belger, have been the coaches of 25 Eight Mentality, an AAU girls basketball program, since 2020. Most of their teams’ games have been against NCAA Division I and Division II competition. Five players in her program are graduating seniors who received scholarships to play college basketball.

“She knows about player development, which comes back to her AAU program, and relationship building, which is key for recruiting,” Rabe said. “And she’s a name. She is known in this area.”

JD Gravina, Schwagmeyer-Belger’s coach during her two seasons at QU, made the drive from Macomb, where he now coaches the Western Illinois University women’s team, to celebrate her new job. He also knows she will compete with him for local players in the same manner she competed on the court for him.

“What she lacks a little bit in college experience, she gains with her basketball knowledge, her ability to form connections and her inner competitiveness,” Gravina said after the press conference.

He said Schwagmeyer-Belger is the only player he’s coaching who is “cut from the same cloth” as Jessica Keller, an assistant coach at the University of Nebraska since 2022 who Gravina predicts “will be doing even bigger things soon.”

“That competitiveness and that drive, sometimes people have that, but they have such tunnel vision. They don’t have the understanding of the game,” Gravina said. “Ali has that understanding of the game. Then some people are so competitive and have that drive, they don’t see the people around them as well and make those connections. Ali has the ability to do that. It’s really kind of the trifecta, plus her AAU experience gives her more experience than people realize.”

QU President Brian McGee realizes his university has become a place where untested but potentially gifted coaches like Rabe and Schwagmeyer-Belger could get a chance.

“I spent four years getting a degree at Ohio State, and anyone who becomes head coach there has some gold-plated resume, and it’s maybe their fifth or sixth job,” he said. “Maybe they’re more than halfway through their coaching career. At a place like Quincy University, we’re often going to hire a coach for whom it’s their first head coaching opportunity, no matter how great the record. What’s exciting to me is we can give a young person with a lot of talent that opportunity and do it in particular for folks who have a local connection.”

Gravina also got that chance from Quincy University almost two decades ago. His college coaching resume consisted of two years at tiny McPherson (Kan.) College before then-Athletic Director Pat Atwell tabbed him to take over the QU program for the 2007-08 season. His teams went 93-28 and went to three NCAA Division II tournaments in four seasons before Gravina headed to WIU.

“I remember (then Herald-Whig Sports Editor) Don O’Brien’s headline that said, ‘Quincy hires some guy from Kansas,’” Gravina said with a laugh and a wink. “It was a little bit like, ‘Who is this guy?’ But you know, I think Pat Atwell kind of saw something in me, just like Josh saw something in Ali.”