OMAHA, Neb., (WDRB) – From the first day of last season, the game that the Louisville volleyball team will play Saturday night has been both the motivation and the plan. The Cards came within one step – without losing a game – before falling short in the national semifinal a year ago.
On Saturday night in Omaha’s CHI Health Center, they will play for the program’s first national championship against a Texas program that has nine of them, and that has been No. 1 for most of the season. But the Cardinals are ready to take their shot.
Having survived back-to-back 5-set thrillers and twice looked at the reality of match points, head coach Dani Busboom Kelly says she feels like her team can “out-team” anyone. A talented Texas squad will put that to the test. The game begins at 8 p.m. in an ESPN telecast.
“Pretty excited to be here,” Busboom Kelly said. “Made history for our program. It's a big deal, and we're still soaking it all in. Going one moment at a time.”
Some of it hadn’t soaked in barely 12 hours later when players Anna DeBeer and Aiko Jones sat down at a news conference podium to preview the Texas matchup.
“(Thursday) night it felt so surreal,” DeBeer said. “I don't think it hit me until maybe even this morning I was still thinking about it, and I was like, I need to let this sink in. Like we are literally playing in the National Championship. So, no, still right now I'm in awe.”
Jones said, “I have the knowledge that we won last night and I have the knowledge we'll be playing tomorrow and we're scouting in practice. But I don't think the weight of the situation or the experience has truly sunk in yet, and I think that's because there's more work to be done.”
The challenge will be deal with a deep and talented Texas team that rolled past a one-loss San Diego team (the one loss was to Louisville) 3-1 in its semifinal. It is led by outside hitter Logan Eggelston, a 6-2 senior from Brentwood, Tenn., who on Thursday was named national player of the year, the first Texas player to win the award. She’s a big hitter, and not the only one on the Longhorn roster.
Busboom Kelly says her team needs to play through Texas’ flashes of brilliance.
“I just think we need to not be wowed by plays that they make,” she said. “We know that they're going to make some plays that are really unbelievable, but each play is only worth one point. So if we can keep that in mind and stay consistent with what we do and disciplined, it will definitely put us in a much better spot.”
Jones said she thinks Louisville’s edge will need to be in preparation.
“Our scouts tend to be close to perfection,” she said. “ So we have a lot of trust in them already. We just have to be the aggressors at the net. We have to own the net, like we like to say, and get to the ball first. And good things will happen when we touch balls at the net. Defense wins championships, that's what they say.”
The Cardinals have done a good bit of damage with their serving in this tournament, and set a Final Four record with 10 aces in their match against Pitt. They’re hoping to keep Texas off-balance by serving deep and getting the Longhorns out of system. But lots of teams try that.
“Dani always says, the answer to everything is serving tougher. So if we can't stop them in certain ways, serve tougher. If we can't do this, serve tougher,” DeBeer said. “It's always just getting them out of system. It helps open up a lot of things for us as a team. I think we knew we had to be pretty aggressive, and Pitt is a great passing team and great team all around. So if we could get them a little shaken up. I think (libero) Elena (Scott) and I did a pretty good job of just trying to point score because that was my goal was to just to go on some runs and see what we could do with that. Not expecting that many aces. That's huge for the team.”
Louisville should have a healthy representation in the arena. A large contingent of Busboom Kelly’s family, friends and fans from her Nebraska days, plus a healthy contingent from her hometown of Cortland, Neb., should be in the arena, wearing red.
And once a team is on this stage, anything is possible. Louisville watched Kentucky win an NCAA title here the last time the title game was in this building, in 2020, and took inspiration from that run to make back-to-back Final Four runs. Tonight the Cards will look for more.
“To the program, I think just being here is a huge deal,” Busboom Kelly said. “It means a lot, just the work put in and the people that have believed in this program and have fought for us to be here means a lot to them and to us.”
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