Not many new college head coaches ever knew more about the job they were walking into than Dani Busbom Kelly did with Nebraska volleyball.
Grew up here. Played here. Assistant coach here. Been the opposing head coach here.
Still, earlier this month when the tickets for Nebraska’s traveling spring exhibition match in Ord sold out in about 30 minutes Busboom Kelly got another welcome (back) to Nebraska moment.
“It’s pretty crazy,” Busboom Kelly said on Tuesday. “Being away from Nebraska for eight years you forget a little bit how big of a deal volleyball is here. And then when things like that happen it’s a quick reminder how amazing it is across the state and how much it means to everybody.”
There will be that feeling again on Saturday when more than 7,000 fans show up at the Devaney Sports Center for “practice” to watch Nebraska and its new head coach.
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Nebraska plays Kansas at 7 p.m. in a spring exhibition match on TV on Big Ten Network.
Nebraska is about four weeks into spring practice. There are two spring matches this year, with the Huskers also playing on May 3 against South Dakota State in Ord.
Busboom Kelly feels good about how the players and assistant coaches have handled the transition from John Cook to Busboom Kelly.
“I feel like it’s been a great transition, and pretty smooth,” Busboom Kelly said. “Everybody has been excited and open. It wasn’t reinventing the wheel here, and doing a bunch of different things. A lot of what I believe in comes from what John was doing. It was just tweaking it a little bit and making it a little bit more my own. The team has been adapting great.”
In recent years Nebraska has only had one spring match, while also playing closed scrimmages against nearby schools like Creighton.
With the coaching transition — and some really tough matches early in the season — it will be good for the Huskers to have two spring matches.
Nebraska also played a closed-to-the-public scrimmage this month against Omaha, and Busboom Kelly really liked what she saw.
“We played different lineups every set and different players and the consistency from the start to finish there was zero drop-off,” Busboom Kelly said. “It’s a sign of a great team when you can change lineups and change players and the energy and the communication and the level of play stays the same.”
Since becoming head coach Busboom Kelly has attended a few of the pro volleyball matches in Omaha to watch her former players from Louisville and ex-Huskers. She’s heard how excited fans are — both for her to be the new coach and also the team, with nine players back from a team that won the Big Ten title and played in the NCAA Tournament semifinals.
“It feels like everybody is really excited and definitely appreciative of the last 25 years and the legacy John left,” Busboom Kelly said. “But I don’t get the vibe that people are disappointed. It’s more excited to see what’s new. And I think they’re really excited for this team; not just me. The team they’ve seen for the last two years, can we take a turn and finish it? And how much improvement can they make?”
Busboom Kelly spent time this winter with the players during the beach volleyball season, including on its trip to Hawaii.
Still, for some players it really set in that Cook wasn’t the head coach during the first week back in the gym for indoor practice. It was different — but fun.
“It was just really weird,” junior outside hitter Harper Murray said. “We didn’t know what to expect with coach (Busboom Kelly). We knew (Cook) liked to take things slow the first week or two that we were in spring season. With Dani we went straight to what we were doing — we were doing six-on-six in the first week.”
Like Busboom Kelly, the players are also mindful of pushing hard to see if they can achieve their goal of winning a national championship, after being on the verge of doing so each of the past two years.
“We’ve made it really far the last two seasons but we obviously have a couple more steps to take to get to the end goal,” setter Bergen Reilly said. “It’s been two years of heartbreak, and now we know that it starts in January. The next season starts in January, and we are really thinking about December each and every day.”
