On Wednesday, August 30, 2023, the Nebraska Huskers Women’s Volleyball team set a world record for most attendees at a women’s sporting event defeating the Omaha Mavericks in front of 92,003 people at Memorial Stadium in Lincoln, Nebraska. The event beat the previous world record of 91,648 fans for a 2022 soccer match between Barcelona and Wolfsburg. Dubbed “Volleyball Day in Nebraska,” it was also a momentous day for a sport that has seen its popularity grow substantially in the last 45 years.
In 1895, William G. Morgan came up with the idea for a new sport which blended the features of basketball, baseball, tennis, and handball. His goal was to create an alternative activity for those that thought other sports were too violent. In particular, Morgan saw the game as an indoor sport for businessmen who found basketball to be too dangerous. After a year in the making, Morgan introduced this idea to the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA) and called it mintonette. Even though the rules and format were unfinished, mintonette soon became a part of the YMCA and was widely played throughout the United States. As the sport grew in popularity, a professor from Springfield College noted the “volleying” while playing and suggested the name volley ball (the name was original two words) instead of mintonette.
A recreational activity that did not involve a lot of equipment, volleyball quickly became an easy entertainment option on school playgrounds, parks, and beaches and was a favorite way of passing the time for the United States military during World War I and World War II. As American soldiers brought the game to Europe and Asia, it caught on quickly. By April 1947, it was so popular that an organization in Paris called The Fédération Internationale de Volley Ball (FIVB) was set up by representatives from 14 countries to organize and govern volleyball at the international level. The FIVB was responsible for helping volleyball become a medal sport in the 1964 Tokyo Olympics and today has a membership of 220 National Federations.
While the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) officially recognized volleyball as a collegiate sport in 1916, participation was low. After seeing the spread of volleyball to other countries and the FIVB’s impact on the sport, the United States Volleyball Association (USVBA) created a collegiate division in 1949 hoping to increase interest. Still, participation was low as teams were only formed by students and were often disbanded as players graduated.
In 1970, the NCAA held the first men’s volleyball championship and only 8 teams participated. It was not until the NCAA assumed authority over women’s college sports from the Association for Intercollegiate Athletics for Women (AIAW) during the 1981-82 school year and held both a men’s and women’s championship tournament that college volleyball truly blossomed. Over the next 17 years, the number of teams participating in the women’s tournament would grow from 20 to 64. On the men’s side, the NCAA responded to a growing number of teams in 2011 by creating a separate tournament for the smaller Division III schools. Today, there are 1,802 women’s teams across all NCAA divisions and 239 men’s teams.
Public interest in the sport has also never been higher. Since 2022, the viewership in college volleyball has increased over 115%. In addition to Nebraska and Omaha’s world record-setting match in August 2023, that season’s Division I Women’s Volleyball Championship set a new tournament attendance record as 19,727 fans gathered at Amalie Arena in Tampa, Florida to watch Nebraska’s downfall to the University of Texas. The sport set another record on September 22, 2024 as 684,000 fans tuned in to watch the first ever regular season game televised nationally on ABC between Nebraska and the University of Louisville. NBC will televise 3 games and ESPN’s platforms will broadcast approximately 2,600 matches. And it is not just fans watching on TV or their computer – over 30 Division I programs reported attendance records last season.
