After building the handball program from the ground up 38 years ago and winning 25 national championships in the process, Mike Steele will be retiring as the head handball coach. This has been a commitment that he he has laid down his time, heart and even life for.
Steele will be retiring to the assistant coach position and slowly phase away from the team during the 2015 season as world champion handball player Dave Steinberg takes over the program.
Steele had an unconventional introduction to becoming the Pacific handball icon he is today.
After learning the game in 1963 at Notre Dame with his roommate, Steele went on to play recreationally. It was not until a fellow Pacific professor invited him to play professionally had he experienced competitive handball.
“I really fell in love with handball because you never have to rely on anyone else,” Steele said. “In singles, it’s very mono-e-mono and very decisive.”
After seeing handball at the competitive level and feeling a lack of knowledge about it from the faculty and student body, Steele decided to start a handball program from scratch with no handball coaching experience.
Steele, who is the current president of the United States Handball Association, laughed as he recalled entering the program and having no idea what the USHA even was.
In addition to having no coaching experience, Steele said the majority of the players he receives, especially in his first year, had never heard of handball, much less played it.
“It was definitely a learning curve,” he said. “There were a lot of things I didn’t know how to teach and we just had to learn as we went.”
Reminiscing back to his early coaching days, Steele told the story of himself as a spritely young coach, approaching a hall of fame coach and asking if people have natural hops or if it is something you can teach. The coach politely replied yes and Steele later found out that a hop was one of the most basic handball techniques to be taught.
He laughed, embarrassed, as he said he imagines the coach makes fun of him for that moment to this day.
After his first group of players jumped into learning handball, Steele’s life changed completely and handball became one of the essential points of his life.
He said he feels indebted to his players because if they had not been up for the challenge, his life would be vastly different now.
Steele beamed as he described his team and their desire to jump into any challenge.
“They’ve been described as scrappy,” he said. “They just don’t quit.”
The team takes after Steele in that sense, who described his play style as intense. His intensity on the court came to a climax in 2009 when he played his daughter-in-law so intensely that he collapsed of a heart attack on the court and flat lined, literally laying his life down for a match.
“Apparently I was being uncooperative and combative but all I remember was looking down at my feet and feeling nervous,” he laughed.
Not even a day later, Steele was having his wife sneak his laptop into the ICU so he could write a Fulbright recommendation letter for a student, who later won the award.
It is that kind of dedication and heart that made Steele so invaluable to the athletic department, his players and his students during his 40 years at Pacific.
Steele teared up as he remembered moments in his career when he felt he faltered as a coach and it cost his players victories.
“I don’t take anything lightly,” he said. “There are definitely things I would do differently if I could replay certain moments.”
His humility and dedication to the well being of his players have helped nurture the handball program to one of the best in the country and one of the most close- knit, with five marriages sprouting in the 38 years of its existence.
Steele said while he is sad to take a step back, he is very confident and proud to pass it over to Steinberg and the existing coaches who, he said, are the best in the country.
Whether it’s coaching, spectating or rallying on the court, Steele said handball has become an incredibly important piece of his life; one that he would not have known if it weren’t for the time he spent at Pacific as the head handball coach.
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