Louisville volleyball could make NCAA history
Dani Busboom-kelly won an NCAA volleyball championship as a player. She won as an assistant coach. She very well could win as a head coach. If so, she would be a first.
In 40 years of the Division I women’s volleyball tournament, only men have been the head coaches of teams that hoisted the trophies at the end. If Busboom-kelly and the No. 1 Louisville Cardinals can finish their undefeated season with a national championship on Saturday, Columbus and Nationwide Arena will have a place in history.
It would no doubt be a significant, glass-ceiling-shattering moment for one of college athletics' premier women's sports. But Busboom-kelly doesn't want history to take away from what her team has accomplished or put her in a different category as if she isn't as good or better than other national championship-winning coaches.
"I know a lot of my female peers have said it would be amazing to be the first female to win the national championship. But it would also just be amazing to have a female win the national championship and break that barrier,” she said. “But at the end of the day, I also hate that it comes down to gender. And on Saturday if we win, I want it to be because I'm the best coach this year, not because I'm a female.”
Busboom-kelly is only the third female coach since at least 2000 to make the final four. The programs who made the final four from 2004 to 2018 all had male head coaches.
Louisville made it out of a regional with Florida, Georgia Tech and Ohio State — all of whom have female head coaches. It was the first time in NCAA history all four teams in a regional were led by women.
"It was great,” Busboom-kelly said. “This year a woman has a great chance to win it. I think there's going to be more and more. There's more and more women staying in coaching and making impacts and the game is changing in that way.”
Since she was hired by Louisville after the 2016 season, Busboom-kelly has been perhaps the most impressive coach in all of volleyball. Each season, the Cardinals have improved, making the tournament in 2017, winning a match in 2018, making a regional final with an upset of No. 2 Texas in 2019 and earning a national seed in 2020 before this remarkable 32-0 season and the program's first final four berth.
All-american setter Tori Dilfer said Busboom-kelly has instilled a belief in the team that has enabled the program's rise from the obscure to potential powerhouse. "Two years ago when we were in the tournament, we were labeled the upset queens,” Dilfer said. “Dani's big thing was we needed to believe we were going to win before. Not in an arrogant way, but like, winners win before a match starts in their own head. I think that has been something that we have kept with us the last couple years.”
At Nationwide Arena in 2016, Busboom-kelly was an assistant coach at her alma mater Nebraska with longtime coach John Cook and watched the No. 1 Huskers lose in the semifinal. Cook said he's not surprised to see her rise as an elite coach.
"She's done an amazing job. She's done it really quickly," he said. "To go undefeated to this point is really, really hard."
Busboom-kelly couldn't deny she has thought about what it would mean for her to be the first female coach to win it all. She has even mentioned it to recruits. It would be another first of many.
“That's a goal of mine,” she said, “and it would be amazing to do it at Louisville.” jmyers@dispatch.com @_jcmyers