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    • Paris Olympics could be next step for women’s volleyball success
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    Paris Olympics could be next step for women’s volleyball success

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    PARIS — When more than 91,000 fans filled Memorial Stadium last August to set an attendance record for a women’s sporting event, Jordan Larson couldn’t suppress a pang of jealousy.

    One of the best volleyball players in American history, Larson helped turn five-time national champion Nebraska into the college volleyball powerhouse it is today. And while the Midwest, and Nebraska in particular, is known for its tremendous support for volleyball, Larson has never played in front of so many people in her home state, let alone her home state.

    “Just talking about it gives me goosebumps,” Larson, the USA Volleyball captain who will help the Americans defend their gold medal when Olympic volleyball pool play begins July 29, told USA TODAY Sports. “I think it’s amazing what people see when you show it to people. That attention and exposure — my (professional) teammates overseas were talking about it. That’s something I never had.”

    But she hopes that will change soon.

    The Paris Games, expected to be dominated by female athletes, come at a great time for women’s sport. There has never been more interest and investment, as evidenced by record-breaking TV ratings, booming media deals and popular conversations.

    That’s especially true for women’s basketball, which is benefiting from the popularity of WNBA rookies Caitlin Clark and Angel Reese, whose college rivalry created the fanatical following they now have as pros.

    The question now is whether indoor volleyball will be the next women’s sport to break through?

    The signs are positive: Volleyball is already the most popular team sport among high school girls, according to the National Federation of High Schools, and produces tons of Division I-caliber athletes every year. Last season, the NCAA championship — with Texas beating Nebraska for the second straight time — aired on ABC for the first time, with 1.7 million viewers.

    ESPN has agreed to continue to broadcast the championship game and possibly earlier rounds of the NCAA volleyball tournament on network television next year. The Big Ten in particular has been a major driver of volleyball attendance and will become even more influential next season when it adds four schools.

    And by this time next year, there will be not one but two professional leagues in the U.S., giving America’s best players the chance to play after college without having to live abroad for months at a time.

    Larson expects her sport to become hugely popular soon, and more people will watch it.

    “Volleyball is definitely on the rise and the Olympics are going to elevate all of us,” Larson said, joking that the reason to sign up for volleyball is obvious: “I mean, it’s a lot less running than basketball and soccer, which I think is huge. It makes it more appealing.”

    In all seriousness, Larson believes volleyball has universal appeal, not just because of the amazing athletic feats its athletes regularly display, but because of something else that’s often preached by everyone from successful businesspeople to parents: Teamwork is the name of the game. Volleyball is the ultimate team game, because in most cases, three players on the receiving team touch the ball nearly every time it goes over the net.

    Ironically, Paul Sunderland believes this is precisely why the sport is growing less.

    “Because of the nature of the sport, it’s not very star-driven,” Sunderland said. “Three players touch the ball every time it comes into play, which means there’s very little opportunity for a (volleyball) version of Caitlin Clark or A’ja Wilson or Angel Reese to absolutely dominate the game.

    “Anyone who is a sports fan loves stars, and it is difficult to create such stars in our sport.”

    Sunderland, who won gold at the 1984 Los Angeles Games as a winger for the U.S. men, will announce his ninth Olympics from the NBC broadcast booth this Games. He has literally had a front-row seat to the sport he loves, but has never gotten the recognition he feels he deserves.

    “Women-only volleyball has been incredibly popular for a long time, but it’s only now that the public and the media are starting to catch on,” Sunderland said.

    Sunderland likes to tell the story of how he once asked a group of American children during a presentation to name the starting lineup for the U.S. women’s volleyball team at the Olympics. They looked at him in bewilderment.

    “If I had been in Belgrade or Moscow or Beijing or Tokyo, they could have done it all, they could have named the U.S. team because those international games that happen every summer with the Volleyball Nations League, those games are all televised in those countries,” Sunderland said. “Here it’s on ESPN, Fox Sports, etc. to set up and buy volleyball rights.

    “I just think it’s a complete disgrace that our American women won their first-ever gold in Tokyo, and since then the US women’s team and those athletes have not been on television. That was in 2021!”

    But Katlyn Gao has a plan to change that.

    Gao, a Harvard Business School graduate who has worked in management at Lululemon, Sephora and Walgreens, co-founded and became CEO of League One Volleyball (LOVB), a new professional league, in November 2019.

    She has big plans for LOVB, which will launch in 2025. Really big. Gao can imagine a future where professional volleyball in America is not only popular, but also a major professional sport.

    “Volleyball is a sport that is very easy to get excited about,” said Gao, who grew up in China in the 1980s, where Jenny Lang Ping, better known as “The Iron Hammer” for her thunderous kills as a winger, “was as iconic as Michael Jordan in Chicago.”

    LOVB is expected to begin play on January 8, 2025 with six inaugural teams. The model is somewhat similar to European football, with youth clubs as the basis for each professional team. Gao believes this model will help LOVB become “the next major professional sports league in the US.”

    LOVB will partner with ESPN to broadcast its matches. This is a key part of the new league’s growth, though Gao said that part of the growing interest in women’s sports is directly related to the democratization of media, as streaming platforms make all sports (in theory) more accessible.

    “You don’t watch basketball in the Olympics and say, ‘Oh, I wonder where they are the rest of the year?’ No, you watch it because you’ve been watching it all season,” said Gao, who is determined to do the same with the Olympic volleyball team. “That’s why our ESPN partnership is incredibly important; they’re an anchor for us. The exposure between quads and beyond quads is really important.”

    LOVB follows another professional league, the Pro Volleyball Federation (PVF), which concluded its inaugural season in May, crowning the Omaha Supernovas as the seven-team league’s first champions. More than 11,600 fans showed up for the first PVF match, and the league drew an impressive number of participants in its first season; it plans to add three more teams in 2025.

    LOVB has one advantage over PVF: 17 Paris Olympic participants have already committed to LOVB, including nine of the 12 members of Team USA. (Salary amounts and structure have not yet been announced, but those details are expected in the coming months.)

    Gao described the fact that after decades of no American professional league, two leagues have now been established in America as “fantastic.”

    “Nothing great is built if you have a scarcity mentality,” she said. “What’s good for the sport as a whole is just more awareness and more attention.”

    Sunderland are also happy with this. But he is adamant that only one professional league can survive and is convinced that the two will merge at some point.

    There is precedent for his concern: the WNBA launched during the ABL’s second season, and only the W, which is financially backed by the NBA, survived. It is now in its 28th season.

    Meanwhile, professional women’s soccer has seen the rise and fall of multiple leagues — the NWSL, now in its 12th season, is the third league since the historic 1999 World Cup — that never directly competed with each other.

    Another positive point Gao makes is that volleyball is different from other professional women’s sports: it is never compared to its male equivalent. There is a reason, Gao said, that LOVB does not have the word “women” anywhere in the league’s name: it is not needed. Women already dominate this sport.

    But given all that lurks beneath the surface, can volleyball dominate the American sports world?

    To be sure, it is best to come back in six months.

    Contributors: Steve Berkowitz

    Email Lindsay Schnell at [email protected] and follow her on social media @Lindsay_Schnell

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