At White & Blue Review, if you read our latest newsletter, (and signup, by the way, if you aren’t already) we have kicked off, tipped off, or whatever phrase you want to use, our 14th year covering the White and Blue on the Creighton Hilltop. A lot has changed for many of us over the years, but we have still been there for all the excitement other media may miss. Hopefully I can post myself more from time to time, starting with this…
Jaela Zimmerman digs a ball against Nebraska in the 2021 game at CHI Health Center Omaha (Juszyk / WBR)
If you have ever watched a volleyball game in person, it is usually an intimate affair where you have to be aware of flying volleyballs or players going into the stands. You have to pay attention because you never really know what is going to happen. Someone may be diving into the stands to try and save a ball going out of bounds or you may even be struck with a ball during warmups if you aren’t careful. I covered the Creighton volleyball team in the early years of WBR. To see the growth of this program into what it is today, it is pretty special to be able to to promote two high level Division 1 teams in the state, not to mention the growth happening with the other NCAA Division schools (UNO and UNK) and NAIA schools (Bellevue and Concordia made it to the quarterfinals last season). Two Nebraska D2 schools and four Nebraska NAIA schools finished in the top 25 last season.
If you look at the NCAA women’s volleyball championship numbers from last year (Nebraska-Wisconsin), there were almost 1.2 million viewers on ESPN2. That was the largest audience for the event since it began airing on the ESPN networks. Viewership jumped 71% from the 2020 season title game, which took place in April, 2020 (696K), and up 119% from the previous December edition in 2019 (533K). The semifinals averaged 728,000 viewers, up 20% from 2019. The tournament as a whole was up 42% from 2019.
Point being: when it’s given a stage, people watch. Believe it or not, the Nebraska-Wisconsin championship game was actually the 5th most watched college sporting event from last year. You’d never know it from the way the sport’s television partners cover it.
When Creighton and Nebraska hook up, it is a volleyball showcase for the state, sure. But it’s also an opportunity for the sport to raise its’ profile beyond the state’s borders. Dirk Chatelain from the Omaha World-Herald wrote a column about questions surrounding the mainstream media exposure to women’s college volleyball, and why it isn’t farther along. He raises several interesting data points; among them, that over 450,000 kids play volleyball at the high school level, second only to track and field. Given participation numbers, the sport’s TV ratings, and live sports increasingly seen as the only television programming that is DVR-proof (and therefore more valuable to sponsors) it’s strange that someone — anyone — hasn’t given college volleyball a bigger stage.
Volleyball’s calendar overlaps with football, a fact that creates some media challenges for weekend series with most volleyball games happening on Friday night, Saturday, or Sunday afternoon when College Football and the NFL hog the larger scale media outlets. It also doesn’t help, at least in the Big East’s case, that most of the regular season volleyball games are behind the FloSports pay wall — a profitable business agreement for the conference, but one that caters strictly to die-hard fans.
Further, because of the way volleyball is set up with most of the non-conference matchups coming in weekend invitationals — both to cut down on travel costs and to cram more matches into a shorter timeframe — the single games that do happen, like Creighton vs. Nebraska, have to happen mid-week. That actually isn’t a bad thing; it allows for the sport to have its own night away from the weekend and give it a little more opportunity for exposure. In theory.
For this year’s iteration of Creighton vs. Nebraska, the game is on a Wednesday night. Great. And the game is on FS1, a cable network available in 90 million households. That’s also great.
The game is at CHI Health Center, an arena with capacity for over 18,000 fans. Sort of great, but while this is in Omaha, it isn’t at Creighton’s home court at DJ Sokol Arena, with its’ nice intimate environment of 1300. It is like Kentucky men’s basketball coach John Calipari setting up a home-and-home series with Gonzaga, but refusing to play Gonzaga at The Kennel, instead dictating that the game take place at the larger off-campus Spokane Arena. Well, okay, if you’re a Creighton fan you can live with that since head coaches John Cook and Kirsten Bernthal Booth agree that this is a showcase of volleyball in the state of Nebraska, and the CHI Health Center Omaha is home to the NCAA Championships this year. (And yes, last season’s match was in Omaha as well in the series’ home-and-home rotation, but Nebraska wanted this year’s game at CHI Health Center Omaha due to the NCAA Final Four being contested in that arena this year, and CU was all too willing to take the home match.)
But here is where I really have trouble understanding the thought process — the game is at 5:00pm central time.
What???
John Cook and Kirsten Bernthal Booth embrace this game as a showcase of volleyball in the state of Nebraska (Juszyk / WBR)
Here’s a case where the Big East’s television partner, FOX, is doing exactly what fans of the sport want them to do — giving it a bigger national stage. That’s good! But to do that, the trade-off is making it more difficult for fans to go in person. Think about it:
- It doesn’t give the sport a chance to put it’s best foot forward; there’s dozens of electric college volleyball environments tailor-made to look fantastic on TV, Creighton’s among them, but starting at 5:00pm means that electricity will be lessened, at least at the start, by an inevitably late-arriving crowd.
- Fans heading to the game have to get off work early, or take a day off, especially ones traveling from all over the state.
- Traffic congestion because you’re combining game traffic downtown with the end of the workday in office buildings.
Besides, who is watching FS1 at 5:00pm central time? Is this really a bigger stage? The east coast is likely just getting home from work, the central time people are on the drive home from work, and the rest of the nation to the west has no idea sports are on at this time. The Nebraska-Wisconsin game mentioned above started at 6:30 p.m. central time.
The smaller arenas that are packed for volleyball really creates a wild environment and plays well on TV for casual fans (Juszyk / WBR)
You might ask, “well, why didn’t they get the 7:00pm central time slot?”
There doesn’t seem to be a lot going on outside of football. Well, actually it is Major League Baseball this time around that the game is being wedged in front of. FS1 has the Arizona Diamondbacks at the San Diego Padres that night scheduled for 7:30 p.m. Central.
Would FS2 have been a better option to get exposure in that case? That’s about 60 million subscribers. But do casual fans know how to find FS2? Heck, maybe this should have been arranged with Nebraska Public Media (formerly known as NET) so it could be broadcast across the state of Nebraska with a reasonable start time. I know the media drives start times for sports these days, but at what point is the exposure of the game penalizing the fans that support it?
When it comes to fall sports, women’s volleyball definitely doesn’t get the media exposure it deserves. Women’s sports are becoming more popular overall. It is an untapped opportunity that media outlets need to get on the bandwagon now and really present these broadcasts in a way that displays what is really going on. Starting this one at 5:00pm is definitely a case of “be careful what you wish for”, because the fans in attendance suffer when the schools have to be at the mercy of their media partners.
My challenge to everyone is to be there on time and pack the stands before the first serve (tickets) so that people that are tuned into their TV at home at 5:00pm on September 7th sees the spectacle that is women’s college volleyball.