Nebraska women's volleyball breaks world record

Nebraska won’t play its first home football game until Sept. 16, but on Wednesday night, 92,003 fans packed Lincoln’s Memorial Stadium for Volleyball Day — making it the highest-attended women’s sports event in history.

Highlighted by the Cornhuskers’ volleyball team taking on in-state counterpart Nebraska-Omaha, the crowd broke the previous record for a women’s sports event set in April 2022, when Barcelona hosted Wolfsburg at Camp Nou for a UEFA Women’s Champions League match. 

The evening also included an exhibition between Division II schools Nebraska-Kearney and Wayne State.

Volleyball Day was conceived after Nebraska’s top rival Wisconsin set a regular-season  volleyball attendance record of 16,833 at the Kohl Center in Madison last September — nine days after the Cornhuskers had set the previous mark of 15,797 at the CHI Health Center in Omaha.

Seven months of planning went into putting the event together. That included meetings from police, fire, rescue and traffic to concessions, the band and marketing — and monitoring the weather 10 days out.

“I don’t know how to properly define just how big this is,” Nebraska athletic director Trev Alberts said. “Unless [the football team is] undefeated when we play Michigan in Week 5, I don’t know of anything that’s going to be bigger.”

A Volleyball Love Affair

If it wasn’t clear already, the state of Nebraska is crazy about volleyball. 

Nebraska has sold out 306 consecutive regular-season volleyball matches, which is an NCAA women’s record. Matches involving Nebraska account for eight of the top nine crowds in NCAA volleyball history and 13 of the 14 largest NCAA regular-season crowds.