LOUISVILLE, Ky. — What’s remarkable is not that two women are coaching for the national championship and one will win a title for the first time in the 44 years of NCAA women’s volleyball. It’s remarkable that these women, Katie Schumacher-Cawley and Dani Busboom Kelly, are the two doing it.
Because they are the ideal representatives.
In this historic moment, as Schumacher-Cawley at Penn State and Louisville’s Busboom Kelly match wits before a sold-out KFC Yum! Center and a national ABC audience on Sunday at 3 p.m., they are the embodiment of what it takes to get to the top in an industry dominated by men.
Eighteen of the 20 winningest coaches in Division I women’s volleyball history are men.
“It’s going to be awesome for the sport to get this monkey off its back and move on from this, where it’s not historic that a woman wins,” said Busboom Kelly, 39, in her eighth season and making a second trip to the national championship match with the Cardinals. “It’s just a regular thing.”
Penn State (34-2) and Louisville (30-5) reflect their coaches’ drive and resilience. They won national semifinal matches on Thursday against Nebraska and Pittsburgh, respectively, in dramatic fashion.
Schumacher-Cawley and Busboom Kelly both coached with a steady hand. They fostered confidence from the sideline as their squads’ manufactured comebacks against opponents considered to rank first and second nationally in talent, depth and championship-level experience.
GO DEEPER
Penn State, Louisville set to meet for women’s volleyball national title
The Nittany Lions pulled a five-set reverse sweep, fighting off two match points for Nebraska in the fourth set.
At the start of the decisive fifth set, junior libero Gillian Grimes heard a voice of reassurance in the Penn State huddle: “We’re made for this.” The phrase didn’t come from Schumacher-Cawley. But she is why it was spoken.
Louisville players faced pressure all season to earn a spot in the Final Four at home. As stress rose when Pitt won the opening set and took the lead in the second, Busboom Kelly implored the Cardinals to keep their composure.
“This is going to start to work,” she said.
Without star attacker Anna DeBeer, the senior was injured two points into the fourth set, they swarmed Pitt after turning back three set points for the Panthers in the third.
In short, Penn State and Louisville refused to go away. They kept taking huge swings. They played to win.
“We’re not talking about losing ever,” Penn State outside hitter Jess Mruzik. “We’re never counting ourselves out, no matter how big of a deficit we’re facing.”
In matches played in front of an NCAA-postseason record crowd of 21,726, Penn State and Louisville were the tougher teams.
Is it any surprise, considering the coaches?
“Women are tough,” said Nebraska coach John Cook, who’s won four national championships. “And those two are really tough. Look at them as players. They both won national championships, so this isn’t a fluke. These guys are winners. They’re great competitors. And their teams play like it.”
Schumacher-Cawley, 44, is a Chicago brand of tough. She grew up in the city and starred in multiple sports at Mother McAuley High. She played at Penn State, earned two All-America honors and won a national championship, the school’s first in women’s volleyball, in 1999 for coach Russ Rose.
Rose won six more titles. He’s the all-time leader in championships and wins among Division I coaches. In 2008, Schumacher-Cawley was inducted into the Chicagoland Hall of Fame in a class alongside Dick Butkus, Gale Sayers and Andre Dawson.
She ran the program at Illinois-Chicago for eight seasons and returned to Penn State to work for Rose in 2018 — four years after the Nittany Lions’ most recent Final Four appearance until last week.
Schumacher Cawley took over when Rose retired in 2022.
“Following Russ Rose, to take the team back to the Final Four in just three years,” Busboom Kelly said, “take being a man or woman out of it, that’s an amazing accomplishment.”
Early in her third season this fall, Schumacher-Cawley revealed a Stage 2 breast cancer diagnosis and she began chemotherapy. She lost her hair but did not miss a practice with her team.
“We’re obviously wanting to do this for her because she’s been so amazing throughout this season,” said Mruzik, who hammered a match-best 26 kills against Nebraska. “So that gritty five-set win helped put another brick into the piece that we’re trying to build this season.”
Schumacher-Cawley deflects questions about her health and the gender issue in coaching.
“I’m just really excited to represent Penn State,” she said.
Maybe it’ll sink in, she said, the magnitude of two women on the bench, both in charge with a trophy on the court, when they step out under the lights Sunday.
“I’m proud of this team,” Schumacher-Cauley said. “I think I’ve said that every day. I’m proud of their fight.”
The fight transcends volleyball.
Louisville coach Dani Busboom Kelly was the 2021 AVCA national coach of the year. (Sam Upshaw Jr. / Courier Journal / USA Today via Imagn Images)
When Busboom Kelly took over at Louisville in 2017, she doubled the Cardinals’ win total, from 12 to 24, in one season.
In 2019, Louisville advanced to the round of eight for the first time. In 2021, Busboom Kelly was named the national coach of the year as the Cardinals went undefeated until the Final Four, losing in five sets against Wisconsin. A year later, Texas beat Louisville for the national championship.
“She’s led one of the great turnarounds in any college volleyball program,” Cook said.
Busboom Kelly played for Cook at Nebraska from 2003 to 2006. He recruited her off a farm near Cortland Neb. She was a multi-sport star at tiny Adams Freeman High School.
In college, she moved from setter to libero and helped spark the Huskers, alongside future Olympians Jordan Larson and Sarah Pavan, to a national championship in 2006. She won another title with Cook and the Huskers as an assistant coach in 2015.
A year later, she took over at Louisville.
“I hope people appreciate what she’s done here,” Cook said.
Louisville fans appreciate Busboom Kelly, based on the reception Thursday that she and the Cardinals received.
“I think the last time I was on the mic talking about Dani, I called her a badass,” Louisville middle blocker Phekran Kong said Friday at the news conference to preview the championship. “So I’m going to double down on that one. Because she’s legit.”
In the fourth set on Thursday, after DeBeer left with the injury that could keep the senior All-American out of the championship match, middle blocker Cara Cresse promised Busboom Kelly that she would deliver two blocks.
Cresse produced. Momentum flipped. The Panthers fell apart late in the match. Even sophomore opposite hitter Olivia Babcock, crowned Friday as the national player of the year, felt the pressure. The Cardinals embraced it.
“This is for all the people who doubted us,” Louisville outside hitter Charitie Luper said.
Her coach looked on and smiled.
More than to shatter a glass ceiling on Sunday, Busbom Kelly said, she’s excited that a woman will coach her team to the national championship so that athletic directors and future players who might go into coaching understand that it can be done.
“It’s more just being really proud that we can be role models,” she said, “and hopefully blazing new trails.”
(Top photo of Schumacher-Cawley: Dan Rainville / USA Today via Imagn Images
https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/6011224/2024/12/22/ncaa-volleyball-championship-penn-state-louisville-coaches/
