As the Nebraska women’s volleyball team walked out of the tunnel for its most unusual home match yet, the Alan Parsons Project’s “Sirius,” the walkout song for the 1990s Chicago Bulls, blared over the stadium’s loudspeakers.
The choice of music is symbolic, to be sure, but it may actually diminish the aura surrounding the team and its big moment. The Cornhuskers, five-time NCAA champions, were about to take on an overmatched opponent, the University of Nebraska Omaha, but that was a foregone conclusion. The only suspense on Wednesday was whether the match would set a record for the most attended women’s sporting event.
After the second set ended with Nebraska well on its way to a victory, the public address announcer announced: a reported attendance of 92,003 people. It broke the American record — 90,185, set at the 1999 Women’s World Cup final between the United States and China at the Rose Bowl in Pasadena, Calif. — as well as the international mark, set in the April 2022 Champions League match in Barcelona, Spain, between FC Barcelona and Wolfsburg attended by 91,648 people.
“I love volleyball,” said Dylan Folda, a Nebraska senior who attended the event, which also featured an exhibition match between two Nebraska Division II programs. “They’re successful here, and they’re always fun to watch every year.”
The event resembles an all-day party for the state of Nebraska. Fans packed into downtown Lincoln before noon and made their way to Memorial Stadium hours before the Cornhuskers entered, many carrying signs of support for the team. Beer, not normally sold at football games, was flowing, and vendors surrounded the stadium, trying to capitalize on the frenzy.
At a time when the dominant issue in college sports is conference realignment in football, Nebraska’s Volleyball Day exemplified the growing realization among universities that investing in women’s sports can be good for business.
More and more athletic programs are seeing benefits from women’s sports that challenge the outdated notion that there is not enough demand to make women’s programs financially sustainable. Today, business opportunities have presented themselves, many times in playful ways that used to be seen primarily in men’s sports (for example, remember the basketball games played on aircraft carriers).
The Iowa women’s basketball team will host its own outdoor event on a football field this October, a scrimmage against DePaul that will highlight its star guard Caitlin Clark. The Oklahoma softball team held a series of intrasquad scrimmages in October, treating its home crowd to a barrage of home runs before winning its third straight Women’s College World Series title.
According to Patrick Rishe, the director of the sports business program at Washington University in St. Louis, the rules that allow athletes to earn money from their name, image and likeness, known as NIL, as well as shifting societal views on gender equality, have contributed to greater investment in women’s sports, leading to events such as Volleyball Day.
Not every Division I school has the same set of circumstances that would allow it to imagine what Nebraska has on its volleyball team. The state has no major professional sports teams, and the football program for its flagship university enjoys a near monopoly on college sports fandom. (Ask Husker fans about fair-season Creighton men’s basketball fans.)
According to public records obtained by The Lincoln Journal Starjust one of the 522 women’s athletic programs at public universities in the six major conferences — the Big East, Big Ten, Atlantic Coast Conference, Big 12, Southeastern Conference and Pac-12 — will make a profit in 2022. That one program is Nebraska volleyball.
In Lincoln, an immediate catalyst for Volleyball Day was competitive fire. The previous attendance record for the sport was also held by Nebraska, but it came by defeating Wisconsin in the 2021 national championship game in Columbus, Ohio, which was attended by 18,755 people. Because of that loss, and bolstered by a loyal fan base and even the state’s governor, Jim Pillen, the school made a plan to break not only the NCAA volleyball attendance mark, but the record for all sports. of women around the world.
The seeds of the event were planted all the way back in the early 1990s. During that time, Husker football reigned supreme in Lincoln, and the team won three national championships in four seasons, creating a legacy that continues throughout college football, and certainly for Nebraskans of all ages. corner of the state. Husker fans pine for those days, as the football program has made three coaching changes since its last 10-win season and hasn’t won a bowl game since 2015.
For the fans at Memorial Stadium on Wednesday, Nebraska volleyball was more than a vehicle for getting into the record books: Supporting Cornhusker sports ran in their blood.
“It’s like a family thing,” said Zainab Funnah, a Nebraska sophomore from Lincoln who is a member of the track and field team. “I grew up watching volleyball, football, basketball, everything in Nebraska.”
Trev Alberts, Nebraska’s athletic director, said in an interview that the volleyball coach in those days wanted to capitalize on the enthusiasm for football, so Nebraska allowed many football fans to volleyball matches for free if they show their football tickets, which events often happen. next to each other and close to each other in Lincoln.
But as the volleyball team kept winning — capturing its first national championship in 1995, before winning four more in the new millennium — that free lunch disappeared.
Now, good luck finding volleyball tickets in Nebraska.
The demand is resounding, and fans who want season tickets have to navigate a long waiting list. The Nebraska volleyball team has led the sport in average attendance — more than 8,000 — every season since 2013, when it moved to a new, larger arena, not counting the pandemic-affected 2020 season. Many of its athletes have also benefited from relaxed endorsement rules.
According to data from Opendorse, which tracks NIL deals and endorsements, the average NIL compensation per deal for women’s volleyball players in Power Five conferences since July 2021 is more than $3,000, with the Big Ten leading .
Although Opendorse does not rank universities by average NIL compensation, a spokesperson for the platform said the level of interest in a particular program is a reasonable estimate for how much players earn from NIL Lexi Rodriguez, the Nebraska libero who drew the biggest cheers on Wednesday. pregame lineup announcements, has deals with tax preparation company H&R Block and rebate app Ibotta.
Even though the sun had set on Memorial Stadium on Wednesday, the party wasn’t over yet, as a spectacular light and fireworks display lit up the sky in Lincoln.
Nebraska doesn’t expect to make a killing in the lone event. Alberts said the school expects net revenue of $750,000 to $1 million from Volleyball Day, which it will share with the three other participating schools. There are no immediate plans for another event next year, he said.
But the match and its record crowd generated interest in the program — interest that will likely pay future dividends for both the team and the university.