As you may have heard, the University of Nebraska women's volleyball team broke the world record for the most attended women's sporting event with 92,003 fans. Huskers fans packed Memorial Stadium last Wednesday to make history.
Nebraska Head Coach, John Cook, was at the forefront of it all. Cook has been the head coach of the Huskers since 2000 and has made the most out of his 23 years. He is a 4x National Champion, 12x conference champion, AVCA National Hall of Fame inductee, 2x AVCA Division I National Coach of the Year, and has 817 career wins. Cook has an incredible record behind him, but one of his most impressive statistics is the recent attendance record.
Nebraska volleyball has the longest sell-out streak in NCAA women's sports history, with 303 consecutive sold-out matches since 2001. In 2016, the Huskers held the NCAA record for average attendance with 8,210 fans per match that season. Coach Cook saw real potential in his team. He knew that people would want to see them play.
Cook said in a press conference after the game, “To know that it's not me, it's a celebration of Nebraska volleyball, all the levels in the state. We took a chance by playing in Memorial Stadium and to go for the record and break it. So, not only did we make a statement to everybody else about how important volleyball is here, we did it to the world. I don't think anybody could have ever envisioned that when this whole thing started.”
John Cook and Nebraska athletic director Trev Alberts were inspired to make history when the University of Wisconsin hosted Florida at the Kohl Center in 2022 in front of 16,833 fans, which broke Nebraska's previous regular-season record.
To get their record back, Cook and Alberts thought of the biggest stadium at the school…Memorial Stadium.
Terry Pettit, the previous volleyball head coach at Nebraska, said to the Guardian,
“This could not happen without great interest in the sport throughout the state, but it also wouldn't happen without great interest for women competing throughout the country.”
Very few women's college athletics programs have been able to play in a stadium like Memorial Stadium. Nebraska volleyball was the first to do this, but hopefully not the last. Iowa women's basketball has already followed the trend. The team will play DePaul on October 15 at Kinnick Stadium, which seats 69,000.
