The 2024 college volleyball season will now both start and end in Louisville.

The AVCA announced Monday that Kentucky, Louisville, Wisconsin and Nebraska will participate in its First Serve Showcase on Tuesday, August 27, at the KFC Yum! Center, also the site of NCAA Division I Women’s Volleyball Championship in December.

The First Serve Showcase will start with Nebraska of the Big Ten playing Kentucky of the SEC at 7 p.m. Eastern, followed by Wisconsin of the Big Ten versus Louisville of the ACC. The matches will be broadcast on ESPN2.

“Louisville is the place to be for women’s college volleyball this year!” Louisville coach Dani Busboom Kelly said in a release. “We are looking forward to the new season, and this marquee event will be a great way to start it off.”

The event also builds upon a season in which television and attendance records seemed to fall every week. Nebraska played a match in its Memorial Stadium last August and drew a crowd of 92,003 while the NCAA title match drew an average audience of 1.7 million viewers.

“The AVCA is very excited to bring together four teams of this caliber to get the new season started,” AVCA CEO Dr. Jaime Gordon said. “AVCA First Serve offers another way to showcase the sport and continue the momentum from the…

It’s not lost on Delaynie Maple that Indiana volleyball coach Steve Aird is a lifelong, suffering Toronto Maple Leafs fan. 

If you don’t follow hockey, think Chicago Cubs until they finally won the World Series in 2016.

“I made a joke, ‘Are you only recruiting me because my last name is Maple?’,” she said with a laugh.

Well, no, because short of winning a pro tournament, Delaynie Maple has, up to this point, done about all she can do in beach volleyball. And it might have been a while, but Maple was a pretty good high school indoor player.

She graduated Thursday from USC, where all she has on her beach volleyball resume is four NCAA titles in four years, winning almost every postseason honor imaginable. That followed a stellar Torrey Pines High School/club career.

The theoretical next step would be to go pro full time on the beach, where she already has more experience than most 21-year-olds.

But … 

She’s going to play for Aird, that aforementioned Canadian, the seventh-year head coach at Indiana.

“I’m mainly doing it this year to first get a master’s (in sports management) but also push myself in ways that I wouldn’t here,” said Maple, who committed to play beach at USC as a freshman in…

ANAHEIM, California — The Southern California Indoor Volleyball Hall of Fame honored its sixth, seventh and eighth induction classes Sunday before a sell-out audience at Anaheim’s Hwy 39 Event Center.

The event, a veritable Who’s Who of volleyball in Southern California, included Olympians, great coaches  and more.

A highlight was 91-year-old Alice Sanchez accepting a Lifetime Service award for her 50 years of running club events as well as being a senior player champion.

Other lifetime honors went to former USC All-American setter Bill Stetson, for his work the past 25 years as the USA men’s and women’s team doctor, and San Diego businessman Charlie Jackson, who has supported and worked in the sport from youth to national teams, including coaching.

The 2022 class honored included DaeLea Aldrich, Doug Dannevik, David Lee, Jim McLaughlin, Rick Olmstead, Don…

Why not? We hadn’t done a Zoom in a while and wanted to talk some volleyball.

So Emily Ehman, the volleyball analyst for the Big Ten Network, Volleyball World TV and ESPN, and VolleyballMag editor Lee Feinswog caught up, talking about the USA national teams and VNL, Pro Volleyball Federation, NCAA and more:

Because of a changing calendar, NCAA Division I volleyball teams can start practice five days earlier than expected.

From the AVCA and NCAA:

“The NCAA Division I Committee for Legislative Relief approved a blanket waiver to permit member institutions to begin practice sessions in women’s volleyball 22 days before the first scheduled regular-season intercollegiate contest.”

Such a move has been a long time coming, but it’s just for one year with an eye on expanding it and making it permanent.

“The blanket waiver provides one-time short-term relief to allow for additional discussion and review of a future legislative solution,” it added in the news release.

The first playing date is August 30, 2024. Last season, the season began on Friday, August 25. Practices began August 8 last year and will again this season for teams playing their first matches on August 30.

Creighton coach Kirsten Bernthal Booth is in the first year of her term as the AVCA president. 

“I think it’s a health and safety issue,” Bernthal Booth said. “We need to have time to ease our player into the season and we have such a short runway you’d be balancing so many things you need to teach but…

The two teams that played in the NCAA national volleyball championship match have been noteworthy in the offseason.

Start with 23rd-year Texas coach Jerritt Elliott, who has won back-to-back NCAA national championships.

He recently set a new standard for volleyball coaching compensation.

Elliot, who won his first NCAA title at Texas in 2012, signed a new contract extension to keep him guiding the Longhorns through 2029. His total compensation of $800,000, excluding performance bonuses, makes him the highest-paid college volleyball coach. Previously, Nebraska coach John Cook was at the top of the sport with a base pay of $750,000 for 2024.

Elliot signed his contract, obtained through an open records request, on February 26 and was announced by Texas on March 11.

The new deal lowers his base pay from $557,500 to $500,000. However, Elliott will receive $300,000 in 2024 for “Professional Services Payments.” This includes sublicensing intellectual property as well as for personal and media appearances. These clauses are more common in football and basketball coaching contracts but are a novelty in the volleyball world. The payments increase annually to a maximum of $425,000 in 2029. The base pay…