Early years (1967–1976) Nebraska's volleyball history began in 1967 as an "extramural" sport operating as part of the school's physical education department. The team was generally coached by graduate students seeking a teaching credit, and had no dedicated uniforms or practice time. Nebraska entered its first tournament in 1971, traveling to Kansas and winning three games against schools with established varsity programs. Though the school offered its first scholarships for female student-athletes to members of this team, which went 25–10–1 and placed sixth in the
AIAW's Region VI tournament, the university recognizes 1975 as its inaugural season due to "a lack of records [from 1974] and tradition." Sullivan later helped assemble a complete list of records from this season, and insisted players from her 1974 team be included when the university celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of its "inaugural" 1975 team in 2024. Sullivan resigned in 1977 to serve as an associate athletic director under
Bob Devaney, later resuming her coaching career at
George Washington.
Terry Pettit (1977–1999) ;Building a powerhouse
Terry Pettit was hired as Nebraska's second head coach in 1977 at an annual salary of $12,000 . The Indiana native was a poetry teacher and volleyball coach at
Louisburg College in North Carolina when women's basketball coach
Paul Sanderford directed him to apply for Nebraska's open job (twenty years later, Sanderford followed Pettit to NU). Pettit began hosting clinics at high schools across Nebraska, including many small schools where women's volleyball had been entrenched as a spectator sport for decades. His dedication to local development is often cited as a contributing factor to the modern popularity of collegiate volleyball in the state. Early in Pettit's tenure, he scheduled home volleyball matches on the same day as football games, hoping to attract fans to the
NU Coliseum as they left nearby
Memorial Stadium. In 1978, Terri Kanouse and Shandi Pettine became the first volleyball student-athletes at Nebraska (and among the first at any school) to receive full scholarships. After NU defeated future rival
Penn State in its NCAA tournament debut in 1982, assistant
Russ Rose departed Lincoln for
State College and served as PSU's head coach for the next forty-three years. NU returned to the title game in
Hawaii in 1989 as a fan favorite among locals, but was swept by
Long Beach State. Pettit's 1989 team included Janet Kruse, Virginia Stahr, and Stephanie Thater, who became NU's first players to twice be named a first-team All-American. With Kruse and Stahr graduated, Nebraska lost control of the Big Eight in 1993 after seventeen consecutive regular-season championships, twice losing to
Colorado and exiting the NCAA tournament before the regional semifinal for the first time since 1983.
Papillion native
Allison Weston was a sophomore on this team, receiving the first of three first-team All-America selections. Weston led a resurgent Nebraska to a 29–0 regular season with just five set losses in 1994, the best start in school history, but Nebraska was upset at home by Penn State in the regional final. NU frequently hosted early-round NCAA Division I tournament games due largely to the persistence of associate athletic director Barbara Hibner, who convinced Devaney and his successor
Bill Byrne to bid aggressively for national events. Pettit left as the fifth-winningest coach in collegiate volleyball history; he was inducted into the
AVCA Hall of Fame in 2009 and the
Nebraska Athletic Hall of Fame in 2020. He won 694 games and thirty-seven combined conference championships (regular season and tournament) across twenty-three-years, producing more All-Americans than any other program during his tenure. When Nebraska moved its volleyball program to the
Bob Devaney Sports Center in 2013, the playing surface was dedicated in Pettit's honor. After retiring at just fifty-four years old, he became a motivational speaker, author, and podcaster and regularly offers opinions on Nebraska athletics.
John Cook (2000–2024) ;Early success under Cook team was honored by
President George W. Bush at the
White House on May 31, 2001 Despite the absence of two-time All-American
Nancy Metcalf, who redshirted after missing spring practice to compete for a spot on the
United States national team, Cook inherited a strong roster and Pettit later confessed he considered delaying his retirement after a disappointing postseason in 1999. Nebraska started outside the national top ten but coasted to a 28–0 regular season and survived a five-set scare against
South Carolina in the second round of the NCAA tournament, a game in which converted pin hitter Laura Pilakowski had fifteen kills despite undergoing an appendectomy ten days earlier. Cook met his former team in the national championship match, recovering from a 2–1 deficit to complete the second undefeated season in NCAA Division I women's volleyball history. It was NU's only loss of the regular season, after which
Sarah Pavan was named
AVCA Freshman of the Year – she would later become the fourth Division I player to earn four first-team All-America honors and won the 2006–07
Broderick Cup as the best female athlete in the country. Nebraska was upset by
USC before reaching the national semifinal, the fourth of five consecutive seasons NU was eliminated from NCAA tournament by a West Coast opponent. ;Mid-2000s dominance takes a swing against
Texas at
Gregory Gymnasium on Oct. 20, 2004 Pavan led a blistering start to 2005 that saw Nebraska defeat four top-five opponents within the season's first two weeks. Middle blocker Melissa Elmer set several NCAA blocking records, ending with 250 blocks despite twenty-seven of NU's matches lasting three sets. Pavan and Larson combined for forty-one kills as NU became the first host team to win the championship since 1991. team was honored by
President George W. Bush at the
White House on June 19, 2007 Hoping to capitalize on momentum after winning a title in its home state, Cook took his team to
North Platte to play a spring exhibition in April 2007, the start of an annual tradition that has seen the Cornhuskers travel to small towns across Nebraska. NU began the season three months later the favorite to repeat as champion and started 19–0 before an October loss at Texas ended NU's record streak as the number-one team in the weekly AVCA poll. At the time, Nebraska had played 103 consecutive matches and nearly three full seasons as the country's top-ranked team. Pavan's storied career came to a close in a regional final loss to
California; months later, she joined softball pitcher
Cat Osterman as the only repeat Big 12 Female Athlete of the Year. Led by a senior Larson and several other state natives, Nebraska won its fifth consecutive Big 12 title in 2008 and advanced through the first three rounds of the NCAA tournament. Trailing Washington 9–3 in the fifth set, libero
Kayla Banwarth led a nine-point service run to complete a comeback victory and advance to the national semifinal in Omaha, where Nebraska fell behind 2–0 against undefeated
Penn State before dominating the third set to snap PSU's streak of 111 consecutive set wins. The 2008 tournament marked the second time in three years NCAA events in Omaha shattered Division I attendance records, forcing AVCA executive director Kathy DeBoer to rebuff calls to make Omaha the permanent site of the national semifinal and championship rounds, though she praised Nebraska fans and described the state as "the epicenter of volleyball fandom." UCLA ended Nebraska's record ninety-match home win streak early in 2009, and Texas ended NU's five-year run atop the Big 12, becoming the first team to beat the Cornhuskers three times in one season. Cook had been vocal about NU, the No. 2 national seed, being sent to play in
Seattle, and he was later influential in the reformatting of the NCAA Division I tournament to allow higher seeds to host regional rounds. ;Move to the Big Ten Nebraska's 2011 move to the Big Ten Conference meant that for the first time NU would regularly face longtime rival and four-time defending national champion Penn State, as well as Cook's former employer Wisconsin, which was about to become a national power under
Kelly Sheffield. NU won the Big Ten in its first year but was upset by
Kansas State at the Coliseum in the second round of the NCAA tournament, Nebraska's earliest exit since 1993. During the season, starting setter Lauren Cook was arrested for fleeing a hit-and-run accident and charged with a felony – Cook received minimal criminal punishment and missed only two games, prompting accusations of preferential treatment given her status. at the
NU Coliseum on Nov. 21, 2012, one of the last volleyball games at the venue
Tennessee transfer
Kelsey Robinson was named Big Ten Player of the Year in 2013, the program's first season at a renovated
Bob Devaney Sports Center after thirty-eight years at the
NU Coliseum. With Robinson graduated after a single season, a young Nebraska roster went just 23–10, the program's most losses since 1981 and the sixth consecutive season without a trip to the national semifinal. The drought ended in 2015, when freshman outside hitter Mikaela Foecke and twin sisters
Amber and Kadie Rolfzen led a sixteen-game win streak that culminated in a national championship sweep of Texas in Omaha. Foecke had nineteen kills and became the third freshman named the NCAA Division I tournament's most outstanding player. NU spent much of the following season ranked number one in the country and won the program's first conference title since 2011. Nebraska was the NCAA tournament's top seed for the fifth time under Cook and fought off two match points to defeat upset-minded Penn State, but fell to Texas a week later in the national semifinal. After consecutive season-opening losses in 2017, Nebraska lost just twice more and shared the Big Ten title with Penn State. NU defeated the top-seeded Nittany Lions in five sets to advance to the national title match, avenging an early-season loss to Florida to win the school's fifth national title in front of a record crowd of 18,516. Foecke became the fourth player to twice be named the NCAA Division I tournament's most outstanding player. Despite the graduation of Foecke and starting setter Kelly Hunter, NU made a program-record fourth straight trip to the national semifinal in 2018, losing to Stanford in a five-set title match. ;End of Cook's tenure The outbreak of
COVID-19 shifted the 2020 volleyball season to the spring of 2021, and several of Nebraska's matches were canceled or forfeited due to virus outbreaks throughout the Big Ten. The Cornhuskers returned to the national championship match in 2021; Wisconsin's five-set victory broke attendance and viewership records, becoming NU's fifth consecutive national title appearance to set a sport-wide attendance record. Following the season, freshman
Lexi Rodriguez became the second Cornhusker and first libero to be named the AVCA Freshman of the Year. On August 30, 2023, Nebraska hosted
Volleyball Day in Nebraska at
Memorial Stadium, a two-match event featuring four schools from the
University of Nebraska system. The official attendance for Nebraska's 3–0 victory over
Omaha in the second match was 92,003, a Memorial Stadium record and one of the highest ever for a women's sporting event. NU spent the rest of the season ranked No. 1 but was swept by Texas in the national title match, its third national runner-up finish in six years. Cook announced his retirement in January 2025 after 722 victories, fourteen conference championships, and four national titles in twenty-five years as head coach. He was inducted into the AVCA Hall of Fame in 2017 and is considered one of the best coaches in collegiate volleyball history.
Dani Busboom Kelly (2025–present) Nebraska named
Louisville head coach
Dani Busboom Kelly, a former NU player and assistant under Cook, as his successor. ==Conference affiliations==