Eleven years ago today — November 12, 2015 — Rockford lost its volleyball evangelist.
Pat Meinert died that day after a long battle with cancer, closing a coaching career that spanned 40 years and touched just about every corner of the sport in the Rockford area. She was inducted into the Rock Valley College Athletics Hall of Fame that same year.
The career
Meinert was a three-sport athlete at Rock Valley College, where she earned her associate’s degree, and later earned a B.S. in Education from Northern Illinois University, where she also played volleyball in 1974.
She started coaching as an assistant at Rockford East High School in 1976, and the stops that followed read like a map of Rockford volleyball:
In her final season at the helm in 2014, she earned NIC-10 Coach of the Year honors.
But the school jobs were only part of it. Meinert directed countless youth volleyball camps and clinics throughout the region, served as volleyball and athletics coordinator for the Rockford Park District from 2001 to 2015, and directed the Rockford Volleyball Association club. She also coached and chaperoned as a People to People Sports Ambassador coach in Holland in the summers of 2006 and 2007 and in Vienna in the summer of 2007 for the Friendship Games.
The person
Pat never married or had children, but she was a wonderful aunt to 10 nieces and nephews. She believed in God, family, and the importance of teamwork. The Rock Valley Hall of Fame citation describes her simply: humble, caring, and dedicated to promoting her love of volleyball to people of all ages.
Her philosophy was just as simple, and the Rockford Volleyball Association still states it on the page for the scholarship that bears her name: Pat loved the sport and dedicated much of her life to making sure girls and boys had a positive playing experience — placing an emphasis on loving to play the sport more than loving to win.
The legacy
It is still playing out in Rockford, eleven years on.
The Play for Pat Scholarship was established in 2015 in honor of the former Rockford Volleyball Association club director, helping girls and boys achieve their full potential as volleyball players. Each March, the Rockford Volleyball Club fills a gym with green for “St. Pat’s Day,” a club tradition honoring her legacy. Each April 9, the club pauses to remember her birthday.
Mark Green, now the club’s director, learned his coaching philosophy from Meinert. “Pat hounded me for years to become a coach,” Green says. Together, the two started an adult grass volleyball tournament in 2011. When Meinert got sick, Green took over — and the Grasstravaganza is still going strong fourteen years later, with proceeds supporting the Pat Meinert Scholarship.
The Stateline thread
Stateline Sports Network knew her, too. On September 30, 2014 — in the middle of her final season at Belvidere North — SSN’s Dave Schmidt sat down with Coach Meinert on video.
Sep 30, 2014 Belvidere North Coach Pat Meinert talks about the Blue Thunder’s win over Boylan on Monday night, first time in school history
Seven years after that final season, the program she built reached its first-ever Final Four. On November 12, 2021 — six years to the day after her death — Belvidere North played Normal Community West in the IHSA Class 3A state semifinal at Redbird Arena, the Blue Thunder’s first state semifinal appearance and only the second Final Four trip in NIC-10 history.
Pat Meinert never saw that day. But the program she spent 40 years building did — and the club, the scholarship, and the gym full of green every March are still hers.
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