Why Pro Athletes’ Daughters Are Picking Volleyball

As the women’s volleyball Final Four commences in Kansas City Thursday evening, the sport is riding a wave of grassroots momentum at all levels, and one of the adjacent trends is that scores of daughters of pro athletes are competing at high levels.

One of those is Carter Booth, the 6’7” star on a Wisconsin team that will face Kentucky in the Final Four on Thursday. Her father Calvin Booth played in the NBA for 10 years and was the GM of the 2023 NBA champion Nuggets. 

“Volleyball really appealed to her. She gravitated toward it early. She never really played basketball,” the father told Front Office Sports. “There wasn’t really a fork in the road to make a decision. She’s been dedicated to volleyball since 6th or 7th grade.” 

It was a similar story for Cari Spears, who plays at Texas, which lost to Wisconsin in the Elite Eight. She’s the daughter of ESPN NFL analyst Marcus Spears, the former Cowboys first-round pick, and Aiysha Spears, who was a first-team All-SEC basketball player at LSU and a first-round pick in the WNBA. 

“I wish it was some intricate story [of why Cari chose volleyball over basketball], but it’s what she chose,” Marcus said. “We told all of our kids that they had to play sports, which teaches a tremendous amount about life in general. The first thing she tried was tennis. Naturally, basketball was a thought, and my wife was like, ‘If she plays basketball I’m gonna have to coach, and I don’t know if I want that type of stress.’ She put Cari in volleyball at like five years old. She fell in love with it..”

The list of pro athletes’ daughters on volleyball rosters right now goes on. Tim Duncan’s daughter Sidney plays at Stanford. Jackie Taylor, daughter of the late legendary NFL safety Sean Taylor, plays for North Carolina. Ex-Patriots star Willie McGinest’s daughter plays for USC. 

Penn State’s team has three daughters of pro athletes: Caroline and Ava Jurevicius, whose father Joe Jurevicius had a 10-year NFL career; and Alexis Ewing, daughter of Knicks great Patrick Ewing. (Another of Ewing’s daughters, Randi Ewing, previously played at Louisville.)

Many more athletes’ daughters are in the Division 1 pipeline or could soon be positioned to get there. Kevin Garnett’s daughter Kapri is in Michigan’s current signing class. Steph Curry’s daughter Riley and LeBron James’s daughter Zhuri—both known to NBA fans who might be stunned to discover they are already 13 and 11, respectively—are competing in the sport.

Youth volleyball doesn’t get the same level of attention that the youth game does in sports like basketball or soccer, but there is a travel circuit that is absolutely massive. Calvin Booth described convention centers that hold over 100 courts with action from dawn till dusk. “There’s games going on from 8 am till 8 pm,” he said. “The amount of girls playing the sport is probably mind-blowing if you’re not really familiar with it.” 

“It all starts at the grassroots,” Spears said. “If you came to one of these USAV volleyball tournaments and saw how many young women and girls are playing the game, and how invested the parents are, people would understand more why the game is starting to generate what it’s generating.You can go to a convention center and see 6,000 girls playing volleyball, whereas with a basketball tournament it’s probably 800.” 

Katie George, the star ESPN sideline reporter who is on the network’s coverage of the Final Four, and who was the ACC Player of the Year at Louisville, noted some of the reasons volleyball has taken off. 

One is that TV networks—particularly ESPN, Fox Sports, and Big Ten Network—have been giving it greater exposure. In 2023, Fox aired a Wisconsin-Nebraska game directly after an NFL window and BTN aired a Nebraska game from the school’s football stadium in which over 90,000 fans attended. This year, ESPN delivered its most-watched women’s college volleyball season on record, including a Nebraska-Kentucky game on ABC that drew 1.2 million viewers.

“One of our bosses once said you have to show the game to grow the game,” George said, noting that ESPN has followed a blueprint with the sport that it previously used to grow audiences with women’s college basketball and softball.

“The more that we’ve shown volleyball, the more people across the country are falling in love with it—because it’s such an easy watch. It’s easy to understand and to learn,” George said. “There’s a fast-paced nature, and you’re seeing something unbelievably athletic happen in women’s volleyball every 10 seconds. People are diving all over the floor, laying their bodies on the line. It’s about time the world started to take notice of how amazing a sport it is.” 

The semifinals, featuring Texas A&M vs. Pitt and Wisconsin vs. Kentucky, air Thursday night on ESPN starting at 6:30 pm ET. The national championship game is Sunday at 3:30 pm ET on ABC.