Connor Onion estimates he has called 150 volleyball matches during his broadcasting career, including 50 matches over the last four years as a broadcaster for Big Ten Network. He learned many of the intricacies of the sport while watching his cousin, Tayler Onion, compete for titles at Illinois in the early 2010s.
One of his earliest memories of watching volleyball on television came in 2009 when his high school, Lyons Township, was playing for an Illinois state championship. The broadcasters on the call for IHSA TV at the time were Adam Amin and Joe Davis, two of the most prominent play-by-play voices in the business today.
Last Wednesday, Onion was sitting courtside for a history-making night in Nebraska. The women’s volleyball match Onion called for the Big Ten Network between Nebraska and Omaha drew an audience of 92,003 at Memorial Stadium in Lincoln, the largest crowd ever for a women’s sporting event. As for television viewers: There were 518,000 watching the BTN broadcast, the network’s second most-watched regular-season volleyball match ever.
Finally going through pics & video from last week.
This is one I’ll never forget.
The adrenaline. The fireworks. The music. The roar of the crowd. The sea of red. pic.twitter.com/md9YQBk9tI
— Connor Onion (@ConnorOnion)
