UA volleyball set to visit No. 1 Nebraska; are the Wildcats ready for this? | Michael Lev

Arizona will get to practice twice at John Cook Arena at the Bob Devaney Sports Center — the mecca of women’s college volleyball — before facing No. 1 Nebraska on Saturday.

Charita Stubbs might want to channel her inner Norman Dale when the Wildcats first step onto the floor.

Remember the scene in “Hoosiers” when Hickory arrives at Hinkle Fieldhouse for the state title game? Coach Dale has his awestruck players measure the length of the lane and the height of the rim. Fifteen and 10 feet, respectively.

“I think you’ll find this is the exact same measurements as our gym back in Hickory,” Dale says.

It’s his way of putting his players at ease and helping them understand that no matter how big the building or the stakes, it’s still basketball.

The volleyball court in Lincoln is 59 feet long and 29 feet, 6 inches wide. The net is 7 feet, 4⅛ inches high. It’s still volleyball — even if the Cornhuskers play it better and in front of more people than anyone else.

“I think the young players’ eyes will be wide open because they’ve just never experienced anything like that, and I hope that too shall pass,” Stubbs said. “I’ve told the players, and I firmly believe this, ‘We all put our pants on one leg at a time, and we don’t need to bow down to anyone. We need to compete. This is an opportunity for us to learn how to fight.’”

The Wildcats will learn a lot about themselves Saturday night. They’ll find out whether they’re truly ready to take the next step as a program.

No sterner test can be found in women’s college volleyball.

Crowded houses

Nebraska is the gold, or perhaps maize, standard of the sport. The Huskers have won five national championships. They’ve been the runner-up six times. They’ve made the Final Four 18 times.

Nebraska women’s volleyball is incredibly popular. The Huskers drew 92,003 fans for a match at Memorial Stadium, where the football team plays, in 2023. That’s the largest crowd to ever watch a women’s sporting event.

On Tuesday, Nebraska played Creighton at the CHI Health Center in Omaha. Attendance was 17,675 — an NCAA record for an indoor regular-season match.

The Huskers have sold out 337 consecutive matches at the Devaney Center, which recently was renamed in honor of Cook, who retired in January after coaching Nebraska to four national titles over 25 years. Capacity at the Devaney Center is listed at 8,309.

Nebraska’s average home attendance of 8,597 ranks first in Division I. Only five other schools average more than 5,000 fans per home match: Wisconsin, Texas, Creighton, Tennessee and Hawaii. BYU has the largest average home attendance for a Big 12 program at 2,852.

Arizona’s average home attendance is 1,662. Last year it was 1,678. The biggest crowd the Wildcats played in front of in 2024 was 4,630 at ASU. Only five players remain from the ‘23 squad that played at then-No. 1 Wisconsin. Attendance that night in Madison was 7,084.

“I honestly love it,” one of them, senior outsider hitter Jordan Wilson, said of playing in front of large, boisterous crowds. “I love when people chirp. I love when people are yelling, shouting, screaming, cheering.

“I use that as fuel. It gets me excited. I love ... the electric feeling. It doesn’t really get to me in a way where it makes me nervous. It just gets me more fired up. Like, all these people are coming here to watch the game of volleyball.”

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Stubbs and Wilson view the opportunity to play at Nebraska as both a privilege and a challenge.

The Huskers’ popularity is good for a sport that continues to grow. Last year’s national semifinals, including a match between Nebraska and Penn State, averaged 1.1 million viewers. The final between Penn State and Louisville averaged 1.3 million. The Nebraska-Texas final in 2023 drew a record audience of 1.7 million.

“It’s exactly what you want,” Stubbs said. “Volleyball is a very contagious sport. People ... don’t necessarily understand all the ins and outs of it, why the libero jersey is different or why the whistle blows so much.

“But they understand that these girls are doing some pretty amazing things.”

‘Rocks in the way’

Arizona would be a heavy underdog Saturday even if it was playing well. Lately, it has not.

The Wildcats landed in Lincoln with a three-match losing streak, including a 3-1 defeat at home against UTEP on Tuesday. Arizona had won 17 matches in a row before the skid, including 11 straight to end last season, when the Wildcats won the NIVC championship.

Stubbs didn’t expect a perfectly smooth ride this year, especially with back-to-back out-of-town tournaments and a relatively quick turnaround before the UTEP match.

“I knew that we scheduled differently, so there would be some rocks in the way, and that’s fine,” Stubbs said.

This year marks the first time since 2016 that Arizona has ventured away from home for its last match before the start of conference play. The Wildcats made the NCAA Tournament that year and ended their season in an NCAA Regional in Lincoln, where Stubbs, then an assistant coach, remembers the building literally vibrating.

This time, Arizona is facing an opponent that has won 49 consecutive home matches, the longest active streak in the nation, before opening Big 12 play with another trip to the Midwest next weekend (Kansas State and Kansas).

“This is where you find out what the kids are made of,” Stubbs said.

Nebraska reached out last year to gauge her interest in playing there. She had to “move a couple things around” to make it happen, which she eagerly did. Stubbs knew what Arizona could gain from this trip.

One of the reasons the Wildcats missed the NCAA Tournament last year was their strength of schedule — No. 66 in the nation, per MasseyRatings.com. Arizona currently sits at 82. Facing the No. 1 team in the country on the road will change that, regardless of the outcome.

“We saw what it was like last year, and we heard the NCAA loud and clear. So we had to put some things into place,” Stubbs said.

“If we duplicated what we did last year in terms of scheduling ... we would be sitting in the same position that we were last year, not invited to the tournament. We don’t want that. That’s not what the players came here for.”

On the heels of winning the NIVC, not making the NCAA Tournament would be a major disappointment — especially with the nucleus of that team back and a year older. How the Wildcats perform against an elite program in a charged environment could reveal what lies ahead.

“We expected them to be a very high-level team,” Wilson said. “I want us to be able to compete with them and keep up with them and play well. I want us to go there and prove a point.”