Team Tampa Bay's Take with Joey Johnston: A Historic Championship Moment

By Joey Johnston

Every once in a while, there is a magical confluence in sports, a moment when a jet-stream rhythm takes over and everything shifts to a different level.

Basketball had Bird-Magic, transforming the Final Four into a mega-event and jump-starting the NBA. Golf had Tiger Woods winning the Masters. Tennis had Borg-McEnroe at Wimbledon. The NFL had Joe Namath’s guarantee.

Now there are parallels in women’s sports.

Softball had Oklahoma’s bashing brilliance at the Women’s College World Series.

Basketball had Angel Reese vs. Caitlin Clark.

And now, on the heels of an unprecedented season for participation, viewership, and popularity, with lifelong fans in heaven and curious newcomers willing to interrupt their football Sunday, college volleyball has its resounding punctuation mark:

It’s the Nebraska Cornhuskers (33-1) vs. the Texas Longhorns (27-4) for the NCAA championship before an expected record-setting crowd at downtown Tampa’s Amalie Arena and a worldwide audience on ABC-TV.

College volleyball has its moment.

“This is probably the biggest moment we’ve ever had (in college volleyball),’’ Texas coach Jerritt Elliott said. “I think people are going to be surfing through the channels and when they see Texas-Nebraska on with 21,000 people in the crowd, it’s going to be super exciting.

“I’m a proponent not just for volleyball, but also for women’s basketball, and really getting people comfortable with seeing these incredible athletes. My friends on a text chain, they’re talking about not just how well we played, but the type of athletes we have. One of them was comparing Madi (Madisen Skinner) to Flo Hyman. That’s the best volleyball player we’ve ever had in the world.’’

Flo Hyman!

When Nebraska held an August volleyball match in its football stadium, the attendance was 92,003. After that, Cornhuskers coach John Cook figures he doesn’t have to artificially sell his sport. The interest is very real.

But the ABC presence adds more juice.

“I don’t even know if these guys (players) even know what ABC is,’’ Cook said. “I think about the Wide World of Sports years ago, watching Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier. ABC was the sports channel that you’d always watch for big-time sports.’’

The Thrill of Victory … and the Agony of Defeat.

“Man, this is big time,’’ said Cook in the wistful tone of a little kid discovering the game he loves.

Earlier this season, Fox followed its NFL Sunday games with a Wisconsin-Minnesota volleyball match. It drew an average of 1.66-million viewers.

“That got my attention,’’ said Ericka Galbraith, the ESPN/ABC coordinating producer. “It showed us there’s an alternate viewing experience for non-football fans. I have high hopes … two such highly respected schools in the national championship. I just feel like if you stumble upon it, even if you’ve never been in the college volleyball world, it’s going to grab you.’’

“Think about it: ABC is in everyone’s household,’’ said Katie George, the ESPN/ABC color analyst who played volleyball at the University of Louisville. “It might be on in the background. Somebody might be watching and saying, ‘What is this?’ No sport has a rhythm like our sport. There’s a slam dunk on every single play — every single play!’’

The Tampa Bay Sports Commission and the University of South Florida have combined to host an event that already has drawn rave reviews. Elliott flatly said that Tampa should host the NCAA Division I Women’s Volleyball Championship every single year. Cook said he never received such a stunning welcome-to-town reception as the one staged by Tampa, when a steel-drum band, dozens of club volleyball players and the bead-wielding Gasparilla pirates were there as players exited their charter aircraft.

But for the TBSC, this has always been about more than staging another championship volleyball event.

There were two guiding mantras.

Setting the Standard.

Whether it was hospitality, the student-athlete experience or fan amenities, the TBSC always intended for this event to stand alone in the eyes of folks who make the annual volleyball pilgrimage. Thursday night, Amalie Arena, filled to the brim and buzzing like never before, set the event’s national semifinal attendance record of 19,598 (the old mark was 18,374).

Growing the Game.

Back in August, when the TBSC held a preseason tournament (with Florida, Georgia Tech, Penn State and USF), there was an expressed goal and responsibility that the Road to Tampa Bay would not only produce a national champion, but the tournament would help to lift the sport to new levels.

Thursday’s national semifinals drew 1.1-million viewers for the most-watched semifinals on ESPN platforms — and a 52-percent growth over the 2022 event.

“Now we have a Texas-Nebraska match on ABC national television to really blow it out of the park,’’ Elliott said.

“It’s the stuff you dream of as a little girl, just starting out,’’ Skinner said. “You see all the amazing people who came before you and you want to be just like them.’’

“When we played our stadium match, all of us were either on CNN, Fox News, MSNBC … those places,’’ Cook said. “It was a whole different world. Different people know about us now. Different people are watching.’’

“This is a really big deal for our sport,’’ Nebraska libero Lexi Rodriguez said. “You see the attendance records and the media records and how they keep growing. It’s going in the right direction. We want to play for each other and leave it all on the court. We want to play fearless.’’

Nebraska vs. Texas.

Hello, world!

College volleyball’s moment has arrived.