Pro Volleyball’s Secret Weapon - Front Office Sports

Morning Edition

April 9, 2025

Interest in volleyball has spiked in recent years, particularly at the college level. League One Volleyball is betting on a youth pipeline that’s a decade in the making to carry interest to the professional ranks.

—Margaret Fleming and Ryan Glasspiegel

How LOVB Is Turning Youth Volleyball Into a Pro Powerhouse

LOVB

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.

The First-Ever LOVB Finals Are Here

The wait is over—professional volleyball has arrived.

On April 10, 11, and 13, the inaugural League One Volleyball Finals will take over Louisville’s KFC Yum! Center, showcasing six world-class teams and 19 Olympians battling for the first-ever championship. This is more than a tournament—it’s a turning point for volleyball in the U.S.

With elite talent, national TV coverage on ESPN2 and ESPN+, and thousands of young athletes witnessing their future firsthand, the LOVB Finals are setting the stage for a new era of professional volleyball. Don’t miss this historic moment as champions are crowned and the sport reaches new heights.

Discover how LOVB is molding the future of the game.

Pro Volleyball’s Secret Weapon: College Stars Who Have Big Fan Bases

Austin American-Statesman

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.

College Volleyball’s Audience Is Spiking—and Networks Are Noticing

Dylan Widger-Imagn Images

Women’s college basketball has been one of the more surprising sports-growth stories in recent memory, as intense competition and electric atmospheres inside arenas have translated into a burgeoning TV property.

Two years ago, Fox Sports had a wild idea: Air college volleyball in NFL-adjacent windows. Most of the country saw Wisconsin-Minnesota airing with the NFL as its lead-in—where a lot of regions had Packers-Vikings before the match—while others saw Michigan–Ohio State leading into an NFL window.

The aggregate result? 1.7 million viewers, the most-watched regular-season volleyball window of all time.

“We’ve seen with other properties where obviously you can use the strength of the NFL lead-in to really expose new viewers to sports that are growing—like women’s volleyball,” Fox Sports VP Derek Crocker told Front Office Sports. “Seeing those numbers and how well it did really showcased the power of what women’s volleyball could be. We were really encouraged by it.”

Last year, Fox aired 18 matches across Fox (2), FS1 (12), and FS2 (4), up from 12 the previous season. This included the State Farm Showcase at Fiserv Forum in Milwaukee featuring four games including Texas, Wisconsin, Stanford, and Minnesota.

Big Ten Network (which is majority-owned by Fox) aired 68 matches last year, its most ever. In 2023, Wisconsin-Nebraska drew 612,000 viewers to BTN, and the matchup garnered 591,000 viewers last year. This week, BTN is airing spring volleyball coverage for its first time. Demographically, volleyball has the youngest audience and most female viewers of any sport for the network.

Other networks are also airing more volleyball. Last year, NBC Sports featured four Big Ten women’s volleyball games for the first time, including three on the NBC broadcast network (simulcast on Peacock) and one exclusively on Peacock. The latter, an Oregon-UCLA game, was part of a Black Friday tripleheader that also featured Pitt–Ohio State in men’s basketball and a Nebraska-Iowa football game.

You can read Ryan Glasspiegel’s full story here.

FRONT OFFICE SPORTS NETWORK

Olympian Melissa Ortiz on Her Fight for Equality

Olympian turned broadcaster and entrepreneur Melissa Ortiz joins Leslie Osborne and Arielle Houlihan to talk about her soccer career with the Colombian women’s national football team and the fight for equality, the launch of Kickoff Coffee Co., and the process of freezing her eggs.

Redefined is a Front Office Sports Network show that celebrates the stories, experiences, and realities of multidimensional women in sports who are redefining success. New episodes release every Wednesday and can be found on Spotify, Apple, YouTube, and the FOS website.

Watch the full Redefined episode here.

ONE BIG FIG

Spike Heard Around the World

Dylan Widger-Imagn Images

92,003

The record-breaking crowd at Nebraska’s Memorial Stadium for Volleyball Day on Aug. 30, 2023, which made it the highest-attended women’s sports event in history. The event surpassed the previous record set by Barcelona in April 2022 and showcased Nebraska’s immense passion for volleyball.

A Volleyball Revolution Is Here

Volleyball has long been one of the most-played sports in the U.S., yet it lacked a professional stage—until now. League One Volleyball isn’t just launching a league; it’s building a movement. By creating the country’s largest youth club network, LOVB ensures that young athletes have a clear path from their first serve to the professional level.

And now, all roads lead to the LOVB Finals. With six powerhouse teams, Olympic medalists, and national team stars, the battle for the first-ever championship is set. Join the excitement and experience the Finals in Louisville—details at LOVBFinals.com.

Learn more about how LOVB is shaping the future of volleyball.

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Editors’ Picks

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by Annie Costabile

Team executives decried a “false narrative” around the franchise.

Women’s College Hoops Is Growing. But Caitlin Clark Was an Anomaly

by Michael McCarthy

Final Four viewership fell by 64% after Clark’s last year in college.

Florida Men’s Hoops National Title Is Ultimate Proof of SEC Dominance

by Amanda Christovich

The SEC won a title and broke men’s basketball records this year.

Question of the Day

Are you more inclined to watch a professional player on your local team if they were a star at a nearby college?

YES NO

Tuesday’s result: 45% of respondents thought the men’s national championship game would outdraw the Houston-Duke Final Four matchup, which averaged 16 million viewers. Florida’s win over Houston ended up with 18.1 million.

Written by Margaret Fleming, Ryan Glasspiegel

Edited by Matthew Tabeek, Or Moyal, Catherine Chen