About University of North Dakota Fighting Hawks Women's Volleyball
Grand Forks, North Dakota, may be home to the newest team in the Summit League, but the University of North Dakota Fighting Hawks women's volleyball team has brought a legacy of success with them.
UND volleyball was a member of the Division II North Central Conference from the program's inception in 1976 until the conference's demise in 2008. They've had their greatest period of success since moving up to Division I, winning the Great West Conference championship in 2009, 2010, and 2011, the Big Sky regular season championship in 2013 and 2016, and the Big Sky conference tournament championship in 2016 and 2017. The Hawks' appearances in the 2016 and 2017 NCAA Division I Women's Volleyball Tournament were the first in the program's history.
The Fighting Hawks play out of the Betty Engelstad Sioux Center. Opened in 2004, the arena seats 3,300 fans and is also home to the North Dakota Fighting Hawks men's and women's basketball teams. Dubbed "The Betty," it sits adjacent to the Ralph Engelstad Arena ("The Ralph"), which hosts UND hockey and is named after Betty Engelstad's late husband, a major booster of University of North Dakota athletics.
The Fighting Hawks have been coached since 2014 by Mark Pryor, who won Big Sky Coach of the Year honors in 2016. He also won Lone Star Conference and Southland Conference Coach of the Year awards for his work at Texas-Commerce and Louisiana Monroe, respectively.
The Fighting Hawks are the newest member of the Summit League, which features local rivals like the North Dakota State Bison, South Dakota State Jackrabbits, and the University of South Dakota Coyotes. In addition, the Fighting Hawks do battle against the University of Nebraska-Omaha Mavericks, the Oral Roberts University Golden Eagles, the University of Denver Pioneers, the Purdue-Fort Wayne Mastodons, and the Western Illinois Leathernecks.
