LOUISVILLE, Ky. (WDRB) – A sentence you would not have read a decade ago. Some of the largest and most-spirited sports crowds in the KFC Yum! Center over the past year have been for games played by women.
The most recent example: The No. 2-ranked Louisville volleyball team’s sweep of No. 21 Kentucky on Wednesday night in front of a crowd of 12,760 in the downtown arena.
The victory (25-19, 25-23, 25-18) was Louisville’s third this season over a nationally ranked opponent and ninth overall without a loss. And, in its rivalry against Kentucky, which won the NCAA championship in the Covid-altered season of 2020, when a reporter said, “I think that’s three straight,” Cardinals coach Dani Busboom Kelly was quick to respond.
“It is,” she said. “I am keeping track.”
“Four years ago,” she went on, “we got in this 4-year deal with Kentucky, Stanford and Nebraska. And at the time, I would’ve been happy maybe winning one of those. And now I think we’re 5-0, with another huge match (against Stanford) on Sunday. I’m just really proud of the growth of our program and the confidence of our athletes to go out there against those teams and feel like we’re going to win and have a chance to win.”
The first of 3 games in the KFC Yum! Center for the Cardinals this season began with flames shooting and smoke billowing during starting lineups. Most of Louisville’s players had seen it in the arena before. A few, like UCLA transfer Charitie Luper, hadn’t.
“It was so amazing,” said Luper, who led the Cardinals with 13 kills, and hit a service ace for the game-winner. “It was jumping. It was super good. I can't even describe my emotions. It was just so surreal. It was amazing seeing everything, the smoke, the fans, the red lights. It was everything I could have ever dreamed. . . . The fans were super into it. I could hear them behind me the whole game. They were into every point. So it wasn’t just a win for us, but a win for them.”
A record crowd of 12,760 watched the Louisville volleyball team beat rival Kentucky in the KFC Yum! Center on Sept. 13, 2023.
This program, I keep writing, carries itself like few on campus. It possesses a joyful confidence that seems to stay with the program even as All-Americans depart. Several of them were in the crowd on Wednesday.
There was little drama in the match itself. Louisville fell behind 9-6 to open the match, then scored 10 straight points and largely controlled things from there. All-American Anna DeBeer served 9 of those 10 points, and seemed to take some steam out of Kentucky early.
“We pride ourselves on being a great serving team,” Busboom Kelly. “So, when we’re making errors that gets frustrating. But typically it does take just one confident server to go back there and hit a few good ones in a row and we get our mojo back. Anna’s one of our best servers. It’s just, she’s high-risk, high-reward. And tonight she was high reward.”
Louisville took a 4-0 lead in the second set before Kentucky regrouped, and actually held a 23-22 lead before committing a service error, then an attack error, and Elena Scott finished of the set with a serve and an assist on a DeBeer serve.
Kentucky opened a 6-2 lead in the third set, but Louisville answered with 6 straight points, 5 of them served by freshman Kamden Schrand, including a pair of aces. The freshman out of Notre Dame Academy in Villa Hills drew praise from her coach afterward.
“That’s a freshman who has barely served all year coming into Game 3 and kind of bust it wide open,” Busboom Kelly said. “But she does that every day in practice. To be able to come in and do it on this stage, that’s going to help us throughout the year.”
At a time when volleyball is ascending – ESPN is carrying more matches, and carried Wednesday night’s match in prime time – Louisville and Kentucky are well-positioned to take advantage. They aren’t going to draw more than 92,000 like Nebraska did, but that’s not the goal, according to Busboom Kelly, who won national titles at Nebraska as a player and coach.
“We don’t want to get into the comparison game of what Nebraska or Wisconsin (which drew 17,037 to a match against Marquette) is doing,” she said. “We’re really proud of what we’re doing in Louisville. It means a lot to this program, the staff, our university and most importantly, to our athletes when they get to come out and put on a show for this many people and really enjoy it. And they are one of the most appreciative bunches in the country. I know they were really loving every minute of it.”
Said Luper: “It means a lot to women’s sports. We’ve been trying to get a lot more fans for the past couple of years. And we’ve seen Nebraska and how many fans were with them. For us to have fans like this having our back tonight shows how much Louisville really loves volleyball.”
And Louisville volleyball, by the way, is still pretty good. If you’re keeping track.
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