Nebraska volleyball's 'rock star-like' season continues with No. 1 vs. No. 2 match (2024)

LINCOLN, Neb. — This season for Nebraska volleyball has morphed into something bigger than its quest to win another national championship or knock Wisconsin from the Big Ten perch.

Since the Huskers filled Memorial Stadium seven weeks ago and gained international attention for attracting the largest crowd ever, 92,003, to attend a women’s sporting event, their journey — just their presence at times — has transcended volleyball.

Consider what Nebraska experienced early in this conference season when it left Lincoln for matches.

“It’s unreal, the people that want to take pictures,” coach John Cook said. “They want stuff signed. They want to meet us. In a couple of places, we’ve had to get security. It’s been rock star-like.”

Cook, 67 years old and in his 24th season in charge at Nebraska with four national titles and 10 trips to the final four, has never seen this level of excitement around his team.

“We have police sitting with us on the bench now at some of these places,” he said.

Meanwhile, other attendance records are being shattered, too. No. 1 Wisconsin and Marquette drew 17,037 at Fiserv Forum in Milwaukee last month, the largest crowd to watch a college match indoors in the regular season. No. 5 Louisville drew 12,760, a school record, for its win against No. 20 Kentucky. Indiana, Michigan and Michigan State broke single-match school attendance records in September.

The TV viewership, 466,000, for the Nebraska win at Stanford on Sept. 12 set an ESPN record for volleyball.

“Women’s sports are on fire right now,” Cook said. “And I think the stadium match had a lot to do with it.”

Iowa women’s basketball Sunday attracted 55,646 to Kinnick Stadium for an exhibition game, a record for the sport.

The Aug. 30 match at Memorial Stadium, in which Nebraska beat Omaha in straight sets amid a celebratory atmosphere at the Volleyball Day in Nebraska event, ignited something, for sure. It connected volleyball with an audience that it rarely reaches, inside and outside of sports.

(Video courtesy of Nebraska Athletics)

The stadium match also set the Huskers on a course as a team of destiny. They’ve capitalized on the momentum to push their record to 18-0 after a victory Wednesday night at Northwestern.

And now, a moment of truth has arrived.

Incoming to Devaney Center on Saturday is No. 1-ranked Wisconsin, also 18-0. The Badgers and No. 2 Nebraska, along with unranked The Citadel, stand as the only remaining unbeaten Division I teams.

Wisconsin is Nebraska’s nemesis. The Badgers have won 10 consecutive meetings in the series after the Huskers won the first eight of 10 in Big Ten competition. Since the start of the Wisconsin streak Oct. 11, 2017, Nebraska is 102-13 against all other Big Ten foes.

But Wisconsin’s dominance has coincided with something of a drought for Nebraska. The Huskers won their most recent national championship by defeating Florida in the title match two months after the streak began. Stanford beat the Huskers in the 2018 championship match, the last of four consecutive trips to the final four for Nebraska.

Since 2018, Nebraska has missed three of four final fours, losing twice in the round of eight and last year in the round of 16 against Oregon. And in the most recent final four that the Huskers played, Wisconsin beat them in a five-set thriller in 2021 to secure its first national championship.

So yes, Saturday night in Lincoln rates as a huge event. First serve is set for 7 p.m. on the Big Ten Network, likely about an hour after the conclusion of the Northwestern-Nebraska football game at nearby Memorial Stadium.

Nebraska has sold out an NCAA-record 313 consecutive home matches. If it could re-create the stadium match Saturday, fans might fill the place again. Ticket demand at the 8,309-seat Devaney Center is off the charts. The cheapest standing-room-only tickets on the Ticketmaster resale marketplace were available Wednesday for $284.

Courtside seats on StubHub this week sold for $600. Ticket holders asked $1,250 for a courtside seat and $250 to $450 for a single seat in the upper sections.

“It’s great for volleyball,” Cook said. “We’re used to playing in these matches. This is where you want to be.”

But for Cook and his players, he said, “it’s business as usual.”

None of the Huskers were made available to the media this week before the team traveled to Northwestern. Cook met with reporters Tuesday but skirted most of the questions about Wisconsin.

The coach talked to his players Monday about the schedule for the days ahead, he said. They worked on preparation for Wisconsin and Northwestern, then shifted focus to the Wildcats.

“Nothing ever changes,” Cook said. “We stay in our routine.”

They’re four weeks into the grind of a Big Ten season. Nebraska played better in the nonconference season than it has in winning nine matches in league play. It has dropped five sets against Big Ten opponents and needed five to win at then-17th-ranked Purdue on Sept. 29.

Cook has long said the challenge to win a Big Ten championship over 10 weeks is greater than what it takes to win a national championship in the three-week NCAA postseason.

Nebraska starts four true freshmen this year who ranked among the top 10 recruits nationally a year ago. For them, the first month of the season — highlighted by the stadium match and the four-set win at powerhouse Stanford — amounted to a “honeymoon phase,” Cook said.

The conference schedule takes a larger mental and physical toll.

“At the beginning of the Big Ten, the first couple weeks,” Cook said, “I don’t think (the freshmen) really understood. Now they get it.”

Before this season, the Nebraska players wrote letters to themselves and packed them away to read when they faced adversity. In her letter, outside hitter Harper Murray, a leading candidate for Big Ten freshman of the year, wrote a reminder to trust her training, talk to people closest to her and avoid emotional swings on the court.

The Big Ten will test her on all of it. And the biggest test yet comes Saturday.

There’s another test lurking for Nebraska. How will the young Huskers respond when nothing — not even the opportunity to topple Wisconsin — lives up to the second weekend of their season?

Freshman setter Bergen Reilly said last month that she expected the stadium match would prepare Nebraska players for anything that awaited this fall. But she admitted that its excitement would be tough to top.

“Having your fourth game in college be played in front of 90,000 people is a little unprecedented,” Reilly said. “But I wouldn’t have it any other way. I think that will forever probably be the best night of my life.”

Cook said: “It’s uncharted territory for us. That’s why we’ve got to keep them engaged. We’ve got to keep them improving.”

Cook and Nebraska athletic director Trev Alberts envisioned the big event as impactful beyond Nebraska and the sport of volleyball. But the reach of the stadium match has exceeded all expectations.

University of Nebraska-Lincoln faculty members Frauke Hachtmann, Brian Petrotta and Jason Stamm, through the College of Journalism and Mass Communications, are conducting a study on fan engagement expressed via social media in the context of Volleyball Day in Nebraska.

They found that 70,680 mentions of Nebraska volleyball on X, Reddit, Facebook and YouTube produced 1.58 billion social impressions over a 30-day period around Aug. 30.

It may be that the destiny of these Huskers is not to end the streak against Wisconsin. Even if Nebraska wins Saturday or if it gets back to the final four and wins the national championship, this team’s destiny is perhaps connected primarily to that night in August.

At a pep rally on the afternoon before the stadium match, sophom*ore Bekka Allick met a 10-year-old girl who looked like Allick and wore her jersey and wanted to meet her. They embraced. The moment meant as much to Allick, 19, as any part of that day.

“It made me realize that what I do and what I stand for and how I play, it’s a lot more than what I think it is,” Allick said in a Nebraska-produced documentary on the volleyball event. “It’s not just me showing up for practice. And it’s not just me playing hard. I’m representing somebody.

“I constantly tell myself if I don’t see somebody that looks like me in my position, I’m going to be the first.”

Above all else, because of this season, that’s what they are — a volleyball team of pioneers.

(Photo of Bergen Reilly, 2, and Andi Jackson, 15: Dylan Widger / USA Today)

Mitch Sherman is a staff writer for The Athletic covering Nebraska football. He previously covered college sports for ESPN.com after working 13 years for the Omaha World-Herald. Mitch is an Omaha native and lifelong Nebraskan. Follow Mitch on Twitter @mitchsherman