Fifty years since North Carolina State won the NCAA men’s basketball tournament without crossing its state line, Louisville volleyball has a chance to claim its national championship without leaving the city limits.
The home team advanced to its final four Saturday night with a four-set victory over Stanford at Freedom Hall, keeping a tentative appointment with destiny that has been the goal and dream of coach Dani Busboom Kelly since the KFC Yum Center was awarded the final rounds of the 2024 tournament five years ago.
“An epic moment for this program,” Busboom Kelly said. “When the Final Four got announced here (for) 2024, it was like a dream. Can we ever do this? Will we have a team that could make it? Then to go through this season with all the pressure — and we’ve been talking about this almost every single week — to be able to get through those moments and just play how we did tonight, it was incredible.”
The road has not been entirely smooth. U of L had to survive a serious scare from Northern Iowa in the tournament’s second round and dropped the first set against Stanford Saturday. And the road ahead is doubly daunting, with a match against top-ranked Pittsburgh (2-0 against Louisville this season) scheduled for Thursday’s semifinal and two potential finals opponents (Nebraska and Penn State) who both swept the Cardinals in September.
Still, regardless of results yet to be determined, U of L’s third final four in four years is a feat worth savoring. For Anna DeBeer, the All-American outside hitter from Assumption High School, the victory served to vindicate her decision to compete for a fifth season as a graduate student (through the Covid-19 eligibility extension).
“It’s unbelievable,” she said. “I didn’t really know if we were going to get there, but we talked this whole season on how there is all this added pressure now that [the final four] is in Louisville and how we were going to handle that. I knew it was going to be hard to be here and finally say that we did it, but that was one of our goals. Not our main goal, obviously, (but) just to be in Louisville and have a crowd behind us. I really knew early on I wanted to take my fifth (year) and be in the most perfect situation like right where we’re at. It’s been awesome.”
Except for the added burden of trying to live up to what others might deem predestined, to secure home-court advantage when it matters most, and despite DeBeer’s hyperbole, what Louisville volleyball has achieved hardly qualifies as “unbelievable.” Since the untidy exit of Rick Pitino and the recent slippage experienced by baseball and women’s basketball, Busboom Kelly now coaches the most successful sport on campus.
Signed through 2028 at a base salary of $400,000, with a total of $350,000 in retention bonuses added last year, Busboom Kelly is likely due for a salary bump. Happily, the five-year contract Nebraska coach John Cook signed in May probably precludes her from returning to her alma mater any time soon. Still, her success is bound to attract other suitors.
To keep her long-term, U of L should consider sweetening her deal and, to the extent possible, revisiting her arena situation.
With the exception of the 2020 Covid-19 shutdown, Busboom Kelly’s team has sold out every season since 2019 in its cozy campus arena, but the official capacity of the L&N Federal Credit Union Arena is just 1,331. Though U of L’s seven regular-season matches at the Yum Center averaged announced crowds of 8,995 this season, securing additional playing dates at the downtown arena could be challenging. Finding the funds to build a bigger on-campus arena figures to be harder still what with the pressing need to start paying NCAA athletes and the priority assigned to those sports that turn a profit.
While this is still a concern as opposed to a crisis, venues provide an unambiguous clue about a university’s commitment. U of L coach Dan McDonnell has been pointedly public about his frustration with the school’s failure to follow through on a planned indoor practice facility. Should Busboom Kelly decide to speak out, three final fours in four years gives her the leverage to make people listen.
No Place Like Home For Louisville Volleyball
This article appears in Dec 4-17, 2024.