How Nebraska drew 92,003 volleyball fans
Call it tradition or chutzpah, it was a great moment for Big Red
Nebraska drew a stadium-swelling 92,003 college fans to Lincoln’s Memorial Stadium Wednesday. But it wasn’t a football crowd drawn to see Big Red take on Oklahoma or Texas.
They were volleyball fans, and they set a stunning record — the largest announced crowd ever gathered to see a women’s athletic event. That’s more than the World Cup, the Olympics, you name it.
The Cornhuskers became the epicenter of women’s sports (let’s say simply sports, OK?) when they swept Omaha 25-14, 25-14, 25-13.
(Note to readers: A guest commentary from my good friend Ryan Kronberg, who was at the match, is below.)
The University of Nebraska drew 92,003 fans to an outdoor match played at the school’s football stadium Wednesday. (Photo courtesy University of Nebraska Athletics.)
For college volleyball fans across the country, and Nebraska fans that bleed Big Red, it was a moment that stirred pride and a few tears. “Volleyball Day” in Nebraska has resonated around the world.
As a journalist who has covered the sport for decades — and spent time covering Nebraska volleyball at home and in Ames — I’m not surprised to see the Cornhuskers draw big attention and big crowds.
But 92,003 fans?
A court-level view of Nebraska’s record-setting crowd. (Photo courtesy University of Nebraska Athletics.)
When the Guiness Book of World Records compiles a list of record crowds, it’s something special to think of Lincoln, Nebraska and volleyball as being the two key factors. But it happened.
How did this thing occur? Most college athletic administrators would laugh in your face if you proposed to draw that kind of a non-football crowd at a football stadium anywhere.
In February, director of athletics Trev Alberts (a former Iowa high school football star who played at Nebraska) announced the bold vision of playing the game.
Consider this: Nebraska home matches are typically held in the Devaney Center in Lincoln (capacity a bit more than 8,000). While the venue has been sold out for volleyball matches since 2001, the leap to a football-sized crowd is hard to fathom.
Players look on as fireworks were displayed in Lincoln. (Photo courtesy University of Nebraska Athletics.)
The only volleyball games played outdoors are beach competition — with sand courts and two players per side of the net.
A post-match country music concert and a lot of hoopla helped attract the gate-smashing record crowd. Nebraska assigned shuttle buses and opened parking lots for the special event.
The previous largest crowd to ever watch a women’s athletic event was 91,648 for a UEFA Champions League soccer match between Barcelona and Wolfsburg in Barcelona on April 22, 2022, according to a press release from Nebraska.
A FIFA World Cup women’s soccer match between China and Team USA drew 90,185 in Pasadena, California, in 1999.
The previous NCAA women’s volleyball record was 18,755 when Nebraska played Wisconsin in the 2021 championship.
Nebraska has had a loyal following for the sport for decades. The program was founded in 1975 and the Cornhuskers have won five NCAA championships.
As a Des Moines Register sportswriter for 31 years, whenever an Iowa high school athlete committed to play volleyball at Nebraska, it was considered to be a big deal.
West Des Moines Valley graduate Hayden Kubik played in Wednesday’s match for Nebraska. Omaha players Brynlee Arnold of Glenwood and Olivia Curry of Valley also took to the court.
For young girls growing up in Nebraska, Iowa and beyond, the event was special. (And I can’t imagine the recruiting boost the school will get.)
“I think it’s huge for little girls to see a women’s sports and volleyball played on this big of a stage and having so many people invested in it,” Nebraska player Lexi Rodriguez said. “When you’re little, you have so many dreams and big goals and I think having something to look up to like this to is something a lot of little girls will keep in their back of their mind when pursuing volleyball.”
The University of Iowa will have its own chance at drawing a big crowd to an outdoor women’s event next month. The basketball team will play an exhibition against DePaul at Kinnick Stadium October 15. Reports have indicated at least 40,000 tickets have been sold so far.
How many fans can squeeze into the Crossover at Kinnick to watch Caitlin Clark and her teammates? I’m eager to see, and for other women’s programs to try to push capacity crowds in the future.
I hope you enjoyed this free column. I’m also honored to share a contribution from my friend and colleague Ryan Kronberg, who was one of the 92,003 fans at the stadium…
A major reason that Lincoln and Nebraska were able to have 92,003 on a Wednesday versus the Olympics and the World Cup not getting that many in much bigger cities?
Nebraska volleyball has been organically nurtured, developed over the decades.
Many, many years ago, former coach Terry Pettit had the vision of what Nebraska volleyball could be.
And he, along with his players, took advantage of the ever-popular Nebraska football program.
In the late 1970s when Pettit started coaching, Pettit took advantage of the Nebraska football team playing at Memorial Stadium, a few hundred yards to the west of his team’s venue at the NU Coliseum. Pettit would schedule home matches after football games, then as the story goes hand out flyers to patrons leaving Memorial Stadium after home football games inviting them to join the volleyball team at the NU Coliseum. Eventually, Pettit’s vision worked as more and more Nebraska football patrons started attending those home matches timed to start after a Nebraska football game.
Nebraska Public Media certainly plays a major role as well. In the days long before conference specific television networks, Nebraska Public Media would often show Nebraska home volleyball matches from the NU Coliseum to a statewide audience in Nebraska. Nebraskans had an easy, and free, opportunity to see this sport called volleyball on free, over-the-air television. The popularity of the matches on NET grew and grew and grew.
It also helps that Pettit and Nebraska won and won frequently. Before retiring after the 1999 season, Pettit had led Nebraska to 19 straight NCAA Tournament appearances from 1982-1999, 21 conference championships between the Big 8 and the Big 12, six Final Four appearances, culminating in the 1995 National Championship. Pettit’s teams were perennially nationally ranked as well.
Pettit developed a winning culture that Nebraska patrons easily latched on to, having grown accustom to success down the street from the football program in those years under the guidance of legendary Nebraska football coach Tom Osborne. Like football in the 1980s and 1990s, Nebraska volleyball won and won big and won often. The volleyball team’s success, Pettit’s approach to marketing his team, the showing of the team’s matches on statewide public television, being aired on the radio statewide built a deeply loyal, passionate fan base state wide, and beyond.
Pettit’s hand-picked successor John Cook took that success and built upon it. In his first season after arriving in Lincoln after being a successful head coach at Wisconsin, Cook won the first of four National Championships in 2000. In 2001, Nebraska began regularly selling out matches in the 4,003 seat NU Coliseum. The Coliseum became an intimidating place to play for opponents as the patrons were there, placed seemingly right on top of the court, and were quite loud as well. Nebraska won often in the years under Cook in the NU Coliseum. The passionate fan base that Pettit began cultivating in his tenure, Cook took to all new levels.
In 2013, Nebraska volleyball moved from the NU Coliseum to the Bob Devaney Sports Center, and capacity was announced at just short of 8,000, with more than 8,000 available with standing room areas at the top of the arena. Season tickets for the 2013 campaign sold out in approximately half hour. Every Nebraska match played at the Devaney Sports Center has been sold out.
Cook turned an already fired up fan base, and helped it grow even more. National championships followed in 2006, 2015, and 2017, with appearances every season in the national polls and NCAA Tournament. Often, Nebraska has made it to at least the Sweet 16, if not the Elite 8, or Final Four.
Cook’s sustained success came as Nebraska football went through now a prolonged down cycle that started in 2001. As football has floundered for the past 20 or so years, volleyball has proven to be the most consistent, most successful winner at Nebraska. Nebraska patrons have latched on to the success of the volleyball team, given it deep, passionate support in many areas – financially. According to the most recent public financial made available, per a recent story in the Lincoln Journal-Star, Nebraska volleyball is the only women’s program in the Power 6 leagues among 352 programs that made a profit in 2021-22.
Volleyball has developed a deeply loyal, passionate fan base.
That culminated in Wednesday’s Volleyball Day in Nebraska match at Memorial Stadium. When tickets went on sale this spring, it took less than 48 hours for Nebraska patrons to purchase all 82,000-plus tickets made available. Tickets made their way to secondary online resale sellers such as StubHub and SeatGeek, going for much more than the face value price of $25 for adults and $5 for students high school age and younger.
I missed the opportunity to buy tickets initially, but about a month before the match, I was able to procure one through StubHub. I was able to make my way in to Memorial Stadium to cheer on a Nebraska volleyball program that I have cheered on since I was a youth growing up in the late 1980s and 1990s in the small Nebraska community of Stromsburg, approximately an hour northwest of Lincoln. I still have copies of the Omaha World-Herald and Lincoln Journal-Star newspapers from the 1995 National Championship season. Since moving back to Nebraska prior to the 2017 season, I have been fortunate to be able to attend a handful of matches each season, have attended the second round of the NCAA Tournament match at Devaney Center every year that I have been able to do so. A handful of times, I have been able to take my mom, who still lives in Stromsburg. She, like many others who do not live in Lincoln, or Lancaster County proper, watches the matches when they are on television, will listen to longtime radio play-by-play voice John Baylor give the description on radio for matches not shown on television. She has the schedule each season on the refrigerator, faithful watches or listens to every match home and away.
Being inside Memorial Stadium on Wednesday to see Nebraska volleyball play there was an experience I will never forget, ranks second among my live sporting event experiences, second only to watching Nebraska volleyball win the 2017 National Championship in person in Kansas City. Being there at Memorial Stadium with 92,002 of my fellow Nebraska patrons was an experience that was both surreal and incredible, Patrons came from not just Lincoln, and Omaha, but throughout all of Nebraska, and many other states as well. Many of us may come from different walks of life, have different life experiences, but on Wednesday, we were there together as one with our shared love of Big Red volleyball.
Nebraska volleyball and the reason it is so wildly popular in Nebraska has come organically and naturally. Terry Pettit’s early efforts at promoting the volleyball team off the success of the football program paid major dividends. Then volleyball won and won big, won often, fueling a developing fan base, a fan base that rallied around the team’s great success.
It led to a small farm state being able to do something that could not be done anywhere else, and not at the Olympic games or in a major metropolitan area, and sell out a football stadium with high capacity. Nebraska patrons were able to fill 92,003 inside Memorial Stadium as a tribute to both the outstanding past of the program developed by Terry Pettit, and taken to undreamed of levels by John Cook. The hard work of developing a successful program that not just won here and there, but has enjoyed decades of sustained success at a very, very high level developed a deeply loyal and passionate fan base throughout all of Nebraska and beyond.
Volleyball means so much to so many that call themselves Huskers patrons. It is a source of civic pride and joy not only in greater Lincoln, but throughout all of Nebraska. The hard work the players and coaches of the past, the current team continues to do now has developed a deeply loyal, deeply passionate fan base that supports the team with its wallet in terms of ticket sales both at home, on the road, and in the NCAA Tournament, in financial donations specifically to volleyball, merchandise sales, and eyes when matches are on television. Nebraska volleyball patrons do not just say they like Nebraska volleyball, they show it in so many ways.
Being at Memorial Stadium for Wednesday’s Volleyball Day in Nebraska match was a thrill of a lifetime for this Nebraska volleyball patron. I am so, so thankful I was able to be there.
It was an experience I will cherish forever, never ever forget.