Steve Aird’s turnaround of the IU volleyball program is one of the more underreported stories in IU Athletics over the last few years.
Part of the reason?
Another Bloomington turnaround story has captivated the nation.
“Certainly I’ve joked earlier that it’s taken me a little bit longer than Coach Cignetti to get good fast,” Aird said last week at Big Ten volleyball media day. “But it’s been a labor of love. We’ve been working really hard over the last few years to develop elite-level athletes.”
The volleyball story needs to be told in greater detail.
Despite being picked 11th in the preseason conference poll, Aird’s squad rolled to a 25-win campaign in 2025 while breaking a program record for overall wins (25) and Big Ten wins (14). They reached the NCAA Tournament for the first time since 2010.
With just over a week until the start of the 2026 season, the American Volleyball Coaches Association (AVCA) unveiled its preseason top-25 rankings. Aird’s Hoosiers were picked 16th by the voting coaches, the first time the program has opened the season in the national polls.
The volleyball turnaround is one of many in the IU Athletics space over the last decade. Women’s basketball, softball, women’s soccer and wrestling are some of the other programs that have achieved recent success that has gone well beyond historic norms.
But there’s nothing quite like the IU football turnaround, not just in Bloomington, but anywhere in the history of sports.
It’s a story made for a movie, and Aird’s first time meeting Cignetti seems like it should have a place in the script. It’s a great insight into the mind of the IU football coach.
“First time I met Cig, one of my favorite guys, I learned a lot from him, have a ton of respect for him,” Aird said at the volleyball media day.
“It’s 10:00 in the morning, it’s his third day at work, and I brought a bottle of bourbon as a gift and slid it across the table and said ‘Are we doing this now or are we doing this later.'”
As Aird says, this was Cignetti’s third day on the job, when he was knee-deep in attempting to rebuild the roster ahead of the 2024 season.
With the benefit of hindsight, we now know the answer is clear. Cignetti didn’t have time for idle chit chat (does he ever?), not to mention, he’s a beer drinker.
“He stares at it for about 10 seconds. Slides it back, says, I don’t drink bourbon. He pulls out a legal notepad and he starts taking notes on me: ‘You married? Yeah. Children? Yeah.’ He’s building a dossier on me three days into the job.
“Five minutes into it, he slides it into a drawer, gets up and says, ‘I got to go watch film’, and he leaves the office. So it’s me at 10:15 in the morning with a bottle of bourbon in his office with a notepad and a dossier on me. That was how we met.”
In the moment, Aird probably wondered what in the world just happened? Who is this guy?
Now? Yep, sounds about right.
