Nebraska volleyball sets womens sporting event attendance world record
At first, the idea seemed audacious. Holding a college volleyball match inside the University of Nebraska’s massive football stadium? What would it look like? Would enough people come?
“I think my brain started spinning,” Nebraska’s senior associate athletic director Brent Meyer recently said in an interview on the team’s website.
But then the tickets for Nebraska’s night match against Omaha started selling and selling and selling, with 92,003 fans officially in attendance at the school’s Memorial Stadium for the Huskers’ match against Omaha on Wednesday night, setting a new world record for a women’s sporting event.
The former world record for attendance at a women’s event was 91,648 for a Champions League soccer match between Barcelona and Wolfsburg held in Barcelona’s Camp Nou Stadium. The United States record was 90,185 for the 1999 World Cup Final played in the Rose Bowl.
Those were huge global events with championships on the line. Wednesday’s event in Lincoln, Neb., promoted as Volleyball Day in Nebraska, was the Cornhuskers’ fourth match of the regular season, with an opening match featuring Nebraska Kearney against Wayne State. The program also included a post-match concert by country music star Scotty McCreery.
Husker Nation, you’ve done it.
The WORLD RECORD for a Women’s Sporting Event lives in Lincoln.
Today’s attendance: 9️⃣2️⃣,0️⃣0️⃣3️⃣
There is NO PLACE like Nebraska. pic.twitter.com/lQFguWHyp8
— Nebraska Volleyball (@HuskerVB) August 31, 2023Anyone who didn’t think Nebraska could fill a huge stadium for a volleyball match doesn’t know much about Nebraska volleyball, or college volleyball for that matter. The fourth-ranked Cornhuskers have won five national championships and have sold out 306 consecutive matches, an NCAA record, and the sport itself is in a boom, approaching basketball as the most popular women’s collegiate sport.
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Volleyball is particularly robust in the Big Ten, and most of the game’s attendance records involve teams from that conference. The previous largest crowd to watch a women’s college volleyball match was 18,755 for the 2021 national championship game between Nebraska and Wisconsin. The Badgers also held the record for the largest regular season crowd, set last year with a crowd of 16,833 for a match against Florida.
Those numbers look tiny compared to the crowd that filled Memorial Stadium on Wednesday night. Nebraska officials began discussing the idea of a match inside the stadium early this year apparently with little hesitation about the enormity of the undertaking.
“If we were going to do it, we were going to go big,” Cornhuskers director of volleyball operations Lindsay Peterson told the team’s site. Initially, the school hoped to sell seats in three sections of the 85,000-seat Memorial Stadium, but when tickets, priced at $25 for adults and $5 for children, went quickly in the first few days, officials opened the south end zone seating section and added bleacher seats to accommodate a larger crowd.
Hope you aren’t tired of crowd shots yet, because this ridiculous amount of people are here to watch a VOLLEYBALL MATCH inside a FOOTBALL STADIUM.
There Is No Place Like Nebraska. #Huskers pic.twitter.com/fL1IdTbHpQ
— Enrique Alvarez-Clary (@RadioRicoAC) August 30, 2023There are so many people dressed in all red on the Big Ten Network. I’m blown away! Shoutout to all the Husker fans that showed their support for women’s athletics and the Nebraska Volleyball team. @HuskerVB
— Earvin Magic Johnson (@MagicJohnson) August 31, 2023Nebraska, the fourth-ranked team in the country, won the record-setting match in a sweep, 25-14, 25-14, 25-13.
“This is unbelievable for women’s athletics and to do this at Nebraska. We dreamed big, we really dreamed big,” Huskers Coach John Cook told Big Ten Network after the win.
In a nod to the school canceling classes Wednesday, Cook added, “There’s only three things that shut down the University of Nebraska: One, snowstorms. Two, covid. And three, Nebraska volleyball in the stadium.”
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