A Record Crowd Shows Buildup of Nebraska Volleyball and Women’s Sports

As the Nebraska girls’s volleyball workforce strolled out of the tunnel for its most uncommon residence match, “Sirius” by the Alan Parsons Project, the walkout track for the Nineties Chicago Bulls, blared over the stadium loudspeakers.

The musical selection was symbolic, to make certain, but it surely may need truly understated the aura surrounding the workforce and its massive second. The Cornhuskers, five-time N.C.A.A. champions, had been about to surgically dispatch an overmatched opponent, the University of Nebraska Omaha, however that was a foregone conclusion. The solely suspense on Wednesday was whether or not the match would set a document for the most-attended girls’s sporting occasion.

After the second set concluded with Nebraska effectively on its solution to a victory, the general public handle announcer declared simply that: a reported attendance of 92,003 folks. That broke the American document — 90,185, set on the 1999 Women’s World Cup last between the United States and China on the Rose Bowl in Pasadena, Calif. — in addition to the worldwide mark, set at an April 2022 Champions League match in Barcelona, Spain, between F.C. Barcelona and Wolfsburg that was attended by 91,648 folks.

“I love volleyball,” stated Dylan Folda, a senior at Nebraska who attended the occasion, which additionally featured an exhibition match between two Division II packages in Nebraska. “They’re successful here, and they’re always fun to watch every year.”

The occasion resembled a full-day occasion for the state of Nebraska. Fans packed downtown Lincoln earlier than midday and made their solution to Memorial Stadium hours earlier than the Cornhuskers made their entrance, many carrying indicators of help for the workforce. Beer, which is often not offered throughout soccer video games, was flowing, and distributors surrounded the stadium, making an attempt to capitalize on the mania.

At a second when the dominant concern in faculty sports activities is convention realignment in soccer, Nebraska’s Volleyball Day served for instance of a rising realization amongst universities that investing in girls’s sports activities could be nice for enterprise.

More and extra athletic packages are seeing positive factors from girls’s sports activities that problem the outdated notion that there isn’t sufficient demand to make girls’s packages financially sustainable. Now, enterprise alternatives have manifested, many instances in gimmicky methods beforehand seen primarily in males’s sports activities (for example, recall basketball video games performed on plane carriers).

The Iowa girls’s basketball workforce will host its personal out of doors occasion on a soccer discipline this October, a scrimmage in opposition to DePaul that can spotlight its star guard, Caitlin Clark. The Oklahoma softball workforce held a collection of intrasquad scrimmages final October, treating its residence crowd to a barrage of residence runs earlier than successful its third consecutive Women’s College World Series title.

According to Patrick Rishe, the director of the sports activities enterprise program at Washington University in St. Louis, guidelines permitting athletes to earn cash off their title, picture and likeness, often called N.I.L., in addition to shifting societal views on gender fairness, have contributed to larger funding in girls’s sports activities, resulting in occasions like Volleyball Day.

Not each Division I college has the identical set of circumstances that may permit it to conjure what Nebraska has with its volleyball workforce. The state has no main skilled sports activities groups, and the soccer program for its flagship college enjoys a near-monopoly on faculty sports activities fandom. (Ask Husker followers about fair-weather followers of Creighton males’s basketball.)

According to public information obtained by The Lincoln Journal Star, simply certainly one of 522 girls’s sports activities packages at public universities in six main conferences — the Big East, Big Ten, Atlantic Coast Conference, Big 12, Southeastern Conference and Pac-12 — turned a revenue in 2022. That one program was Nebraska volleyball.

In Lincoln, a right away catalyst for Volleyball Day was aggressive fireplace. The earlier attendance document for the game additionally belonged to Nebraska, but it surely got here by means of a loss to Wisconsin within the 2021 nationwide championship match in Columbus, Ohio, which 18,755 folks attended. Motivated by that defeat, and boosted by a loyal fan base and even the state’s governor, Jim Pillen, the varsity made a plan to interrupt not simply the N.C.A.A. volleyball attendance mark, however the document for all girls’s sports activities globally.

The seeds of the occasion had been planted all the best way again within the early Nineties. At that point, Husker soccer reigned supreme in Lincoln, and the workforce received three nationwide championships in 4 seasons, forging a legacy that also resonates all through faculty soccer, and positively for Nebraskans in all corners of the state. Husker followers pine for these days, because the soccer program has made three teaching adjustments since its final 10-win season and has not received a bowl recreation since 2015.

For followers at Memorial Stadium on Wednesday, Nebraska volleyball was greater than a car for getting into the document books: Supporting Cornhusker sports activities ran of their blood.

“It was just like a family thing,” stated Zainab Funnah, a sophomore at Nebraska from Lincoln who’s a member of the monitor and discipline workforce. “I grew up watching volleyball, football, basketball, everything in Nebraska.”

Trev Alberts, Nebraska’s athletic director, stated in an interview that the volleyball coach in these days needed to capitalize on the fervor for soccer, so Nebraska let many soccer followers into volleyball matches at no cost in the event that they confirmed their soccer tickets, with the occasions usually occurring in succession and close to each other in Lincoln.

But because the volleyball workforce continued to win — capturing its first nationwide championship in 1995, earlier than successful 4 extra within the new millennium — that free lunch vanished.

Now, good luck discovering volleyball tickets in Nebraska.

The demand has been resounding, and followers who need season tickets have needed to navigate an extended ready listing. The Nebraska volleyball workforce has led the game in common attendance — greater than 8,000 — each season since 2013, when it moved to a brand new, bigger enviornment, not counting the pandemic-affected 2020 season. Many of its athletes have additionally benefited from loosened guidelines on endorsements.

According to knowledge from Opendorse, which tracks N.I.L. offers and endorsements, the typical N.I.L. compensation per deal for girls’s volleyball gamers within the Power Five conferences since July 2021 is greater than $3,000, with the Big Ten main the best way.

Though Opendorse doesn’t rank universities by common N.I.L. compensation, a spokeswoman for the platform stated the extent of curiosity in a given program is an affordable approximation for the way a lot gamers are making from N.I.L. Lexi Rodriguez, the Nebraska libero who drew the most important cheers throughout Wednesday’s pregame lineup bulletins, has offers with the tax preparation firm H&R Block and the rebates app Ibotta.

Even because the solar set over Memorial Stadium on Wednesday, the occasion wasn’t over, as a bombastic mild and fireworks present turned the sky over Lincoln vibrant crimson.

Nebraska doesn’t anticipate to make a killing off the one occasion. Alberts stated the varsity expects internet income of $750,000 to $1 million from Volleyball Day, which it’s going to share with the three different colleges that participated. There had been no rapid plans for one more occasion subsequent 12 months, he stated.

But the match and its document crowd have drummed up curiosity in this system — curiosity that’s prone to pay future dividends for each the workforce and the college.