The professional arm of League One Volleyball (or LOVB, pronounced “love”) played its first matches in January, but the organization quietly laid roots in the volleyball world over the past several years.

Founded in 2020, the league bought up and built out a network of thousands of youth teams across the country, which created a natural fan base (and one-day pipeline) for its eventual pro teams.

Omaha, Austin, Madison, Salt Lake City, Houston, and Atlanta are home to the league’s six inaugural teams. The first four cities are women’s college volleyball hotbeds—the University of Nebraska, the University of Texas, the University of Wisconsin, and Brigham Young University all have historic programs and fan bases. And in the 2024 National Volleyball Club Ranking, LOVB’s programs in Houston and suburban Atlanta placed first and second, respectively.

Local Ties

The league didn’t just drop more volleyball into these markets but tapped into the markets even further by filling rosters with hometown players and local college stars. Most of the players on the Austin team’s roster played at the University of Texas, including one of the game’s most recognizable stars, Texas native and former Longhorn Madisen Skinner. Three former Badgers play in Madison, the Salt Lake City team features three BYU and University of Utah alumnae, and one Houston native plays on her hometown team. 

The Omaha team, located in women’s volleyball’s biggest market, has one former Creighton player and five former Cornhuskers, including Lexi Rodriguez, one of the faces of the record-breaking 92,003-fan sellout of Memorial Stadium. For volleyball fanatics, LOVB is kind of like playing Madden Ultimate Team—a roster filled with their favorite team’s stars from different eras.

LOVB teams play in relatively low-capacity arenas. On the smaller end, the Atlanta squad plays in the Gateway Center Arena at College Park—the same roughly 3,500-seat arena as the WNBA’s Atlanta Dream. On the larger side, the Houston team’s Fort Bend County Epicenter can fit 10,000 fans. Social highlight clips from around the league show matches in venues comparable to large high school gyms. The final regular-season matches in Salt Lake, Omaha, and Austin all sold out, according to the league.

That means the league will get a big test this week at its finals tournament in Louisville, which will be played in the 22,090-capacity KFC Yum! Center. The 21,860 fans who packed the same arena for the 2024 NCAA national championship became the second-largest all-time crowd in Division I women’s volleyball history, behind only the Nebraska record-breaker. The get-in price for any individual day of the LOVB tournament is just $15 on April 10, 11, and 13.

Imagine a league structure in which incoming rookies who have massive clout coming out of school join the pro team closest to their college town. Cooper Flagg would head to Charlotte to play for the Hornets, Jayden Daniels would have joined the New Orleans Saints, and Caleb Williams would have stayed in L.A. with the Rams or Chargers. College sports fans would keep their stars close, and pro teams would automatically feel that love through ticket sales.

It’s a model being tested by League One Volleyball (LOVB), one of several new women’s professional volleyball leagues popping up in the U.S. In addition to signing a slew of Olympians from Team USA and beyond, the league tried to tap into the momentum of college volleyball by picking up six players who competed for the national title this past fall. The league then signed three of those players to the closest LOVB team—former Badger Sarah Franklin to Madison, former Cornhusker Lexi Rodriguez to Nebraska, and former Longhorn Madisen Skinner to Austin.

Influencing Off the Court

Those three players have the most Instagram followers of the six, and Rodriguez and Skinner also have big TikTok audiences. On the two platforms combined, Rodriguez has more than 540,000 followers, and Skinner has more than 335,000. For context, the official league accounts have just 276,100 followers on Instagram and TikTok combined. One video of Rodriguez on the LOVB TikTok account has nearly 2 million views.

Creating a new league requires lots of talent to fill the rosters, and LOVB has plenty of veteran players. But just like other growing or debuting leagues, some of LOVB’s biggest names are young players who became popular in college and capitalized on their on-court success through social media and NIL (name, image, and likeness) deals. The WNBA knows firsthand how a talented rookie class can skyrocket a league to new business heights, and the new Women’s Lacrosse League primarily leaned on its younger stars like Charlotte North and Izzy Scane for its biggest media hits.