The following story is from the Fall 2022 edition of the "Roar Report" that came out September 29. It is authored by Gary D'Amato, the former longtime sportswriter and columnist for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, who joined the staff as the feature writer for the Roar Report in the Fall of 2018.

Black & Gold: Through and Through
 
Kathy Litzau admits that she initially struggled a bit when she transitioned in 2007 from head coach of the Milwaukee women's volleyball team to an administrative position in the athletic department.
 
She had spent the previous 14 years experiencing the highs and lows of coaching student-athletes. She was hard-wired to compete. And at the end of the matches, it was easy to define wins and losses, because there was always a score.
 
How would she keep score as the Senior Associate Director of Athletics - Senior Woman Administrator?
 
"Everything was a competition when I coached," she says. "There would be an award for the top GPA and I'd be like, 'We're winning that.' There would be an award for the most community service and I would say, 'We're going to win that.' It was really about how are we staying on top? And then when I left it was like, 'OK, what are my wins?'
 
"That was a huge adjustment. I'm a senior women's administrator and we connect monthly with all the senior women administrators in the (Horizon League). In the beginning they would talk about best practices and share how they're doing things, policies and procedures, and I would become guarded, like, 'Why are we sharing secrets? Why am I giving you this?'
 
"That didn't last very long. You need each other, to know what works for other people, especially when I was new in my position. You learn to connect and build that network and then to lean on each other. It ended up being a really great network for me."
 
Litzau is in her 30th year at UWM and is among the longest-tenured members of the Athletic Department. As the women's volleyball coach, she put together a remarkable record — more on that later — and for the last 15 years she has overseen academic support services, sports medicine and strength and conditioning. She also serves as the sport administrator for women's soccer, women's basketball and men's and women's swimming and diving.
 
Clearly, it's a job she loves.  The passion and energy she once poured into winning matches on the court is spread in other directions. That doesn't mean it has dimmed. And while there is no scoreboard in her office, there are plenty of other ways to keep score.
 
"Working with our student-athletes and our coaches. It's different every day," she says. "The best thing about working in athletics, there's a new season, a new group of athletes, a new year. There are always new challenges."
 
Litzau grew up in Naperville, Ill., and was a multi-sport standout in high school. She was an all-state high jumper and a good basketball player — both of her parents played in college — but stopped after her sophomore year to concentrate on volleyball. She played on an elite club team and was recruited by several Big Ten schools, but eventually chose Notre Dame.
 
"I will say I was a little bit anti-Notre Dame when I was being recruited," she says. "I wasn't going to visit Notre Dame. My Irish Catholic father said, 'Do me a favor and just visit. I'm not telling you to go there. You make the decision. But just go there.' I said, 'OK, fine dad.' And so I went and I had an incredible experience on my recruiting visit. I was like, 'Oh, I see why people think this place is so great.' I had a great four years. Loved it."
 
During her senior year exit interview, her coach, Art Lambert, asked her if she would be interested in going into coaching. Litzau had never even worked a camp, but when Lambert told her there was an opening for a graduate assistant at the University of Illinois, she applied and got the job, then apprenticed under legendary coach Mike Hebert while working on her Masters degree in athletic administration.
 
After two more brief assistant coaching stints, at Wisconsin under John Cook and then at Michigan State, Litzau was hired in 1993 as the head coach at Milwaukee. At the time, she was the youngest head women's volleyball coach in Division I.
 
She was not exactly stepping into the best job in the country. The Panthers were coming off a 3-33 record. Ten minutes into her first practice, she balled up her practice plan and threw it in the wastebasket. 
 
Never mind drills. The Panthers had to learn how to compete, how to fight through adversity, how to play as a team. They lacked focus and discipline.
 
"And so, I learned very early on to make it about the competitiveness," Litzau says. "I had to teach them how to fight, which surprised me. It wasn't so much about how do you serve, how do you pass? It was how do you fight for every point? How do you compete?"
 
Litzau assigned points for everything the players did, from warm-ups to the last drill in practice. It's a system that is carried on to this day by current coach Susie Johnson, who was Litzau's assistant for 10 years.
 
"It becomes very clear very quickly who are the fighters, who's going to compete, who's going to do what it takes?" Litzau says. "I'd put them out there and say, 'Pick your team. Who do you want to go to war with?' Some of them would complain later, quietly, like, 'That's so stressful.' Exactly. It's putting them in those uncomfortable situations and at the same time working on their skills."
 
The Panthers went 6-27 in Litzau's first season and were a .500 team two years later.
 
"And then," she says, "it took off."
 
Over her last 10 seasons, Milwaukee compiled a remarkable 118-14 record in Horizon League play, won or shared the league's regular-season title eight times and made six appearances in the NCAA Tournament. During that span, Milwaukee won 115 of 128 home matches, losing to just two Horizon League teams at the Klotsche Center.
 
Toward the end of her coaching tenure, Litzau started to experience burnout. Not from coaching — "I could stay in the gym forever," she says — but from the demands of recruiting. Her husband was "super supportive," but with four young children at home, it became harder and harder to hit the recruiting trail. Plus, she'd always been interested in administration, and Bud Haidet, then UWM's athletic director, had supported her and given her additional responsibilities within the department.
 
Litzau's plan was to coach another season or two and then look for a job in athletic administration, which in all likelihood meant she would have to uproot her family and move.
 
"And then randomly a position opened (at UWM)," she says. "It was probably two years before my plan of stepping aside (as coach), but I thought this was an opportunity I can't pass up."
 
In 2007, she turned over the program to Johnson, who has since led the Panthers to four more NCAA Tournament appearances. In 2021, Milwaukee went 22-9 overall and finished first in the Horizon League with a 16-2 record.
 
"They've done great," Litzau says. "I'm really proud of Susie. I couldn't be happier that the program is in her hands."
 
Litzau wasn't completely done with coaching, however. Her oldest daughter, Lauren, played volleyball at the University of Minnesota and her youngest daughter, Kayce, currently plays at Wichita State. Litzau coached them, along with another daughter, Danielle, at the club level.
 
"At one tryout, one of the parents said, 'You've never done this age group before? Do you know how to coach?'" Litzau says with a laugh. "So I went from the college level to coaching 9-year-olds. But I was glad to be their first coach."
 
Litzau's background as an elite athlete, a highly successful coach and a parent of athletes gives her rare perspective on the administrative end.
 
"I always cared about the student-athlete experience as a coach, but then when you're a parent of a student-athlete, you see that this is about them as people and that they leave here hopefully having all the skills and resources — everything we can provide for them to be successful as adults when they graduate," she says. "So we work a lot on their career development, their personal development. … We really want to make sure we're educating them and helping them grow as people."